Have you ever felt a strong desire of distributing your unsolicited opinions to virtual beings of social media? After a long hard day, do you get angry because random people are not living their lives the way you want them to? Do you have tendencies of being mean and offensive, even when you are not a bad person? Brace yourself my friend, you belong to the majority community of the internet. Every second human, with access to the worldwide web, has a tendency of being a source of hate. Those who don’t believe me don’t use Twitter enough.
No! This article is not written to call out or make fun of such people. The rest half of the internet crowd does it anyway, on a daily basis. This article is to discuss why there is so much hate on social media platforms. Why many of us don’t even think twice before spewing venom at others? Is it because we are failing as a species, or, we are failing at the Art of Unlearning?
Let me explain the Art of Unlearning. Most hate spewed on social media has a pattern. The source of such hate, at times, are credible sources, thought slowly and over time. The world is growing very fast, but our brains aren’t. A good portion of this controversial education is either outdated or was wrong from the start. But we are not ready to let it go. Either we don’t want to unlearn it, or we don’t know how? Most of these people are not bad, they just suck at the Art of Unlearning!
So, let’s discuss, how can we succeed in this art!
The Physics of Newton’s cradle
If you are a brown kid, you must have seen and lived live examples of it your entire childhood. Remember how in childhood, whenever our parents were angry because of any random reason or one another, in most cases it ended with us getting scolded for whatever wrong things we did in the last decade? Adulting is difficult, and childhood isn’t spared much too. Sometimes, we collect way too much negative energy in us and end up transferring it to someone innocent. Some of us take it silently and pass on, some pass it further with a full orchestra blowing behind them. In the end, hate wins!
The Art of Unlearning: The first thing that we need to do is to unfollow all the negative accounts. It’s ok to disagree with a celebrity and still enjoy their movies, music, sports or other talents. If there’s an account that is consistently sharing thoughts that makes you angry, anxious, or sad, you don’t need this type of negativity in your life. Get rid of them.
Second, we need to smile more often. We spend so much time searching for reasons to smile that when we find a reason, we are already enough exhausted to smile anyway. You don’t need a reason to smile! There’re always good memories, friends whom you can trust on, cute animal videos (If you aren’t following animals on social media, you are doing it wrong), comedians, positive content on the platforms. Smile secretes the happy hormones, which will help you in not spreading the hate further.
The formula is simple: unfollow negativity, break the chain of hatred, and keep yourself busy in being happy.
The Impulse Reaction
Does it ever happen to you that you are scrolling through a social media platform, and you suddenly find a post that’s just bad? The comments on it are on the positive side, but you don’t understand why! So, you take the responsibility to tell the world how bad this post is. A good portion of negative responses on the internet is because of this unsolicited philanthropy. I will show you why it’s unhealthy with a personal example.
A few months back, I switched from being a Facebook addict to an Instagram addict. One fine day, I suddenly recalled one content creator I used to like on Facebook. After lots of looking around, as I didn’t remember her name, I finally found Srishti Dixit on Instagram. After a little stalking, I found her show Behensplaining on Netflix. The show is incredible but Srishti is not the only presenter of the show, the other one being Kusha Kapila. Now, Kusha’s impression I had was exactly the opposite. I stumbled upon her a long time ago when I watched a few of her videos, which I always closed a few moments in. I just couldn’t bear her “Coco/Koko bhaiya” accent. Going against the trend of the internet, I decided to take the less popular path: instead of bashing, insulting, or shaming her, I simply ignored her videos.
This time, when our paths crossed again, I decided to follow her as I really liked her in Behensplaing videos. For the worst-case scenario, the unfollow button was always there, right? Fast forward to today, Kusha is certainly one of my favorite content creators (alongside Srishti of course). That act of her (one I didn’t like) is just one of the characters she plays and is meant to annoy a portion of the audience. She was so good at it that I did get annoyed.
The point I am trying to make here is that one video, one tweet, or one picture is not enough to define anyone on the internet, neither as a content-creator nor as a person. We are always too impulsive to judge people. Even when someone puts something utterly bad, our reaction to it mostly outweighs the original source of the reaction. We all have bad days, bad moods, or aggressive blowouts, and the consequences of them do reach the virtual world at times. If you are a normal person like me, you will be mostly ignored. If you are a celebrity, the amount of hate you can get is mind-blowing. Things go bad when this hate is accompanied by abuses, rape threats, death threats, and character assassination. Nothing, genuinely nothing, in this world can justify such behavior, let alone a stupid social media post.
The Art of Unlearning: Stop throwing your first reaction to the content in the comment section! Pause, stalk around a bit, try not to judge and ignore if it’s ignorable; if you want to comment, place yourself in the receiving end and try to understand how you will feel after getting such a response. Do NOT comment offensive or disgusting stuff. Don’t put yourself at the bottom of the chart of humanity, you are better than this. Karma is a bitch and things do get viral. Getting a truckload of such hate is a hell of an experience (literally) and you may not have a hardened spine like most celebrities.
Internet and the Misogyny
One major source of hate, pretty much everywhere in the world, is society’s weird obsession with modesty. Women are always at the receiving end of this hate. This hate is so deep in our veins that barely anyone is spared. Let me explain this with another personal experience. Few days after the above example, I searched for another internet celebrity. I knew Komal Pandey from her PopXo days. When I found her on Instagram, I was shocked! She was unrecognizable. My first thought was ‘Why is she trying to be a wannabe Khloe Kardashian! And what’s all this ‘Ang Pradarshan’ (body display)’. It didn’t take me a few weeks of following her to realize my hypocrisy, it was instant!
A few months back, before we entered the Covid19 era, I went to Thailand on a solo trip. There, I went on an island-hopping tour, where they put a group of people on a speed boat and show different islands. Turned out, I was the only Indian on the boat that had people from all around the world. As there was a lot of water involved, pretty much every woman, except me, changed into a bikini. These women included all ages and body types. God knows how disappointed I was in myself. I couldn’t have found a better opportunity to fulfill my lifelong dream of donning a bikini. And this missed chance was not a result of any fear or embarrassment, but because I was so exhausted and overjoyed by everything this trip offered me by then, my Indian brain cells couldn’t even come up with such a possibility. During the whole experience, I was not once uncomfortable because of the scantily-clothed women around me.
Even after having such a mindset, my first thought about Komal’s bold content was negative. This is the level of constant regressive thinking we are forced to consume and then we unconsciously puke them out; and this is why unlearning is so important. To be honest, there’s no winning against the wardrobe police. If she wears bold clothes, she is a slut; if she wears very modest clothes, she is boring; stylish clothes, trying to be a wannabe; simple clothes then must be a nerd; bikini is equal to being characterless and burkha is equal to being repressed. If she has a little extra weight, then there’s a problem; if she has a bit less, then she must be starving! Those who have the perfect bodies as per the society’s standard, they must be using their bodies for attention! You just can’t win! As per the trolls, if you are a woman, there’s something wrong with you. Unfortunately, even men aren’t completely spared.
The Art of Unlearning: You have no right to judge anyone’s body and the way they accessorize it, except yours. Don’t even judge yours for your own sake. Unless you don’t watch Bollywood, Hollywood or Netflix, wear traditional Indian clothes with full coverage only and live in a cave, you are a hypocrite! If you are getting uncomfortable because of a random person on the internet, it’s not them but the regressive bullshit you were taught all these years. Unlearn it! If you can’t: unfollow, block, and scroll away!
In the end, I will conclude with: Don’t throw something on the other person that you don’t want to get on yourself. You are not better than the other person, you are just different. If something makes you uneasy, get away from it, do not make it uneasy for everyone. Get rid of the hate as hate is just like fire, it burns the source more than anything else. Don’t be the source!
As you are already here, please give a look at my other content like Poems, a fact-based Solar System series, and much more!
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And don’t forget, internet trolling is good for no one!
Featured Image Credit : Claire Wolfe
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