Columns

Ari B. Adler

Sticks and Stones
and Social Media

January 16, 2012

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. That old saying doesn’t really work anymore with the growth of social media. Your words can hurt others and will probably sting you back.

A recent kerfuffle in Lansing has erupted with words being fired back and forth between political rivals. That’s nothing new; politics is a rough and tumble sport. But with the proliferation of social media, what would have normally been a one-day story contained within the Capitol bubble has been drawn out for much longer and has reached a much wider audience. You can read a great review of the incident in John Lindstrom’s column here in Dome.

Whether you agree with any side in the battle of the sexes being waged in and around the Capitol and across various media outlets, I hope you at least learn a lesson from the mistakes of others.

In my recent conversation with one of the parties involved — Kelly Rossman-McKinney — she noted that this incident, “shows the power of a single word and how easy it is to unlock Pandora’s Box if the wrong person says the wrong word about the wrong person. Talk about mileage per syllable.”

Kelly is absolutely right about mileage per syllable being much higher these days than all of us are used to. The incident was rebroadcast to a much larger audience than usual because interest groups on both sides of the battle took up the cause of their champion and spread the story across the Internet.

Casual observers of politics, by which I mean most registered voters, must have really been shaking their heads over this one. I can imagine most of them were simply using this as one more example of “what’s wrong with government these days.”

Let’s play this out at its most basic level. A woman chastised a man for self-aggrandizement, which in her book makes him a loser. A man compared that woman to a prostitute. Another woman took offense and, in defending the first woman, referred to men as Neanderthals.

How many of us have heard children, suddenly faced with being in trouble for something they have said or done, defending themselves with the age-old line, “She started it!”

As parents, we roll our eyes and say that doesn’t matter. As voters, we roll our eyes and wonder why these people aren’t focusing on what really matters. And as news readers and viewers, we wonder why it was such a slow news day, considering all the important things happening in the world.

The power of words is amazing. After all, isn’t the pen mightier than the sword? If that’s the case, than what does an implement like social media take on the power of? If a pen can defeat a sword, then do communications tools as prolific as Twitter and Facebook take on the power of a cannon?

The biggest lesson in all of this is that we must remember that at work or at home, at business or at play, well-intentioned compliment or tongue-in-cheek joust — it doesn’t matter — the microphone is always on and, now, so is the massive amplifier known as social media.

Having to eat your words used to be difficult enough. Nowadays, they’re sure to be doused with plenty of hot sauce before you have to choke them down.

That means that if you’re faced with a situation caused by your mouth running ahead of your brain, you should probably stop talking until your brain catches up. Every word you say in the interim is going to be shared, “liked” and tweeted among your friends and enemies faster than you can react.

Besides, if you stop talking for a minute, someone else is bound to yell “Squirrel!” and those drooling for attention in the media and online will quickly turn in that direction instead.

Ari B. Adler is a professional communicator with experience as a newspaper reporter and editor as well as a government and corporate spokesperson. He is the press secretary to Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger and an adjunct instructor at Michigan State University. You can follow him on Twitter at @aribadler.