As former President Thabo Mbeki once expressed skeptical views on social media and its role in the advancement and development of democracy, I had my reservations about his views, dreading they might be out of date, but today I stand with him.
Positive and negative propaganda in politics and in the general livelihoods of communities and nations, has received widespread coverage in the news through the various social media platforms. People have attacked each others' persons and families through the many forms of social media. People have been set up for abuse and even death, through this very space we so love. But is it a good thing?
I am saddened, moreover, at the news that Saturday's death of Morning Live anchor and radio personality, Vuyo Mbuli, is said to have reached the ears of his daughter through social media. O! What a sad thing. I am deeply hurt when thinking that, as reported in some quarters, his wife learnt of the man's passing through social media. Whether these reports about his wife learning of his death through social media, are correct or not, still the questions of morality and dignity must be posed.
How many times have people been sued for slander? How many people have been killed because of what Mbeki termed "false knowledge", propagated and couriered in and through social media? Muammar El Gaddafi was killed because someone propagated, through social media, that the Libyan government intended to slaughter thousands of civilians, when those closer to the situation there claims otherwise - that in fact it was the Westerners (Britain, AmericaObama and France) who designed and disseminated such false knowledge.
I can only imagine how Vuyo's family might have felt at learning of the death of their beloved through ill-disciplined means. Death is a very serious thing and Black people treat it as such. Elders of the family are responsible for informing everybody else about it when it happens because they have the skill, the discipline and the way to put the words, so that the people they inform don't collapse to meet their own death at hearing the news brought by the elders.
If, indeed, it is the case that Mbuli's passing was primarily communicated to members of his family through social media, then all these aspects are ignored and his family disrespected. There are a lot of good things about social media, no doubt, but I am of the view that it is not always the best instrument to convey communication, and this I say not as a Journalist but as a Black man. We are forever grateful to the Facebook people, the Twitter handler and his hashtag, Skype men and the rest of them for developing these technologies, but the truth is that these can be so harmful.
I have no more to say on this...
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