will there be a sympathy wave for congress if... - Page 2

Originally posted by: ramjaane

More than politics i hv empathy, i feel the accountable of unfortunate death of this lady is on so called elite on Tharoor and educated twitter class. All corruption charges of Tharoor this lady took upon herself who she may felt betrayed. The other blame is on educated twitter class , who slam this lady for her emotional outburst. Agree its wrong on her part to open her personal life in social platform but she forgot that we so called educated class happy to redicule other on look, character, emotion, expression of others and demean other . We r happy to live in compartment in materialistic world . It is hardly find we show sympathy and empathy to other person. May be she forgot the reality and took this virtual and artificial world to seek solution for her, she forgot that seeking happiness empathy sympathy is rare in this virtual world. May be she try to live in limelight and died in the same. RIP.

What occurred was most unfortunate but why hold other members on twitter accountable when Sunanda herself was an avid twitter fan and had chosen to vent her feelings so publicly? She was no shyster when it came to PDA in real life also. I think it was her illness which had her depressed and take a minor event so emotionally. Under healthier circumstances the sms or e mails shared by her husband with the Pakistani journo shouldnt have caused such an exaggerated reaction. There is nothing unusual about people corresponding on the social media these days. Such insecurity due to that sounds immature and over the top.

Hriday Ranjan, a largely followed blogger from the city, puts things in a slightly different perspective. As someone who spends the better part of his time using social media to share his take on things, he feels that the virtual world tends to give one a false sense of community.

"Shashi Tharoor was one of the first Indian netas to use social media and was quite suave on it as well. He has more than two million followers on Twitter, and that word followers' itself lends a peculiar notion of belonging. Being a public figure itself is one thing, but when you put yourself out there in the virtual world, you are put on a pedestal and you are bound to develop a false sense of circle," he points out, which could also lend a false sense of security and hence he feeling that you can post whatever you like on such platforms.

"In case of Sunanda, my understanding was that she was also hankered post the tweets she put up. And so this playing to the galleries doesn't also always work out well," he adds.

The bottom line, psychologist Dr Diana Monteiro feels, is that it isn't so much as right or wrong to use such platforms for voicing such opinions, but understanding that there are consequences and knowing how to deal with them.

"Social media has created a public life for us and we don't even realise it, and similarly you don't even realise the consequences. You can't imagine how one would react or how information will filter and who finds out what. So you need to be ready to cope with whatever comes of it."

With public opinion playing an important role in one's psyche -- "we tend to draw self esteem from the number of likes on a wall post," the doctor gives as an example -- for people in public eye, knowing this consequences and being prepared with a coping mechanism becomes even more important. "They are under even more scrutiny, and people will take the liberty to comment. As I understand, Pushkar was also heckled for her tweets. The smarter thing to do is to not choose such a course of action when going through an actively difficult time. As you are still trying to deal with it yourself, it may make things worse when other people are also forcing their opinions on you."

http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/The-Ugly-side-to-Social-Media/2014/01/20/article2009708.ece

Besides the deadly cocktail of depression, drugs, a strained marriage, questions have been raised about whether the vicious banter and collective howls of derision on social media over her very public meltdown " again on social media " pushed her over the edge.
Have we, the tweeple, in our eagerness to share every detail of our lives over an internet megaphone, not quite understood what the social media can do, especially its pitfalls? Is the line between the public and private blurring too fast? Commentators say that the rules that govern human and social behaviour haven't changed, and the fault lies in how we negotiate the cyber turf.
Can our digital lives have serious offline consequences? Nishant Shah, director, research , Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, says people need to realize that though twitter amplifies everything, but the ability to hurt, be mean, fight, question, critique and bully is not new.

"These are human practices , which replay themselves across different media forms. What is perhaps new is that our most personal and darkest desires have become available for public spectacle," says Shah.
That the twitterati can be brutal has been shown often enough this last year. When Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal was mired in allegations of sexual harassment, his daughter was hounded on social media. Recently when novelist Lavanya Sankaran wrote an op-ed for New York Times defending the decent Indian man, she was royally derided, so much so that another journalist Rahul Bhatia tweeted in her defence, asking people to lay off.
Sunanda's story hurtled towards a tragedy in a space of 48 hours after she went public. As Shah points out it wasn't as though there were no affairs and scandals before the dawn of social media but the tangle would have spun out differently and less brutally in another time and age. It all began, as Pushkar admitted to some papers and later denied, with the spilling of alleged BBMs sent by Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar to Tharoor on his twitter account.
Predictably, the effect of the first round of revelations was explosive. In fact, Pushkar herself appeared taken aback by the fact that a twitter spat ended up making front page headlines.
The entire drama which, in another age, would have played out at home or a circle of family, friends and acquaintances " and at the most in far less dramatic gossip columns and on TV" was up on social media, provide enormous vicarious pleasure to thousands of social media bystanders. That Pushkar herself set the virtual assault in motion only adds to the bleak irony of it all. This was also not the first time Pushkar took a spat to twitter. @SPTVrocks tweeted about her fight with a journalist in Dubai earlier this month.
Clinical psychologist Varkha Chulani says it is the personality behind the media usage not the form itself that is to be blamed. "People choose to talk about their private lives to impress others, to get attention. We forget what is real and what is virtual." Shah, however, believes that we live in a world of digital striptease and that the ubiquitous and pervasive technologies that surround us have forever blurred the lines between real and virtual.
Activists have often pointed out that the social media has everything going for it " quick and vast connect and instant response " but what it lacks is empathy. It is easy enough to send out an RIP message, for instance, for someone you don't know or even care for, positioning yourself as a caring, empathetic soul in 140 characters.
Post Pushkar's death, news anchor Barkha Dutt tweeted that we need to limit viciousness , stop judging and use greater compassion on twitter.
Shah makes a similar plea for the human touch.
"We are all so self-involved , creating narratives of our selves, bit-stripping every moment , instagramming every event, tweeting every encounter, and liking all the various things that happen around us, that we don't always have enough time to stop, to respond, to think and reflect upon other people's conditions . We have become jaded, to the various 'great' moments in people's time lines, but we are also becoming jaded to the pain that our involvement in these social networks can bring to those who are the subject of our attention," he says.