With just days left until the start of a new year, there’s a lot to reflect on from the past year. Painful global events, personal victories, and plans for the future might dominate your current thinking. Come January, you may have a few resolutions prepared for the year. Whatever happens in the next year, 2016 demonstrated very clearly just how complex our world has become. Adding to this, the current “social media era” was in full swing with politicians, global leaders, and more all taking to their favorite platforms to share and fight in an online public square. The increased emphasis on social media is exactly what I think needs to be discussed before 2017 begins. We cannot allow social media to desensitize our perspective of the world.
Take any social media site. By scrolling through for a few seconds through a social media website, you can be exposed to a dozen different news stories, events, and photographs in a flash. On the outset, this would appear to be an extremely good thing. With modern technology we are able to have access to an extreme amount of information about what is going in the world around us–all in the palm of our hands.
While this is can definitely be a good thing, there is also a danger to being constantly immersed in such a huge amount of information.
That danger is the possibility of becoming desensitized.
In a year that was especially tragic, it seemed as though every day there was another death, another catastrophe, and another mass murder. When we view photos and videos of tragedies that are not directly affecting us multiple times a day every day, there can start to be a decline of genuine feeling. However, these tragic events and their horrifying consequences do not lose any of their terrible reality for those who are experiencing them first hand. When news of a shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse reached social media, people from around the world were quick to spread the word, reach out to the victims’ families, and comfort each other. Yet within a few months, discussion of the event seemed to vanish from online platforms.
There are many instances where this kind of explosive initial reaction followed by little to no long term action has occurred. In 2017, make an effort to avoid becoming desensitized to tragedies. These kinds of events are calls to long-term action, not short bursts of initial fear and sensationalism.
