It’s just over a year now – Feb. 9, 2019 – that a young woman produced a video that showed her pitching a patio chair from a balcony 45 floors above the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto. Her stunt on Snapchat got thousands of social media hits. Instagram later picked it up and carried her response to the resulting charges of mischief endangering life.
“Chair girl wants charge dropped,” social media outlets said.
Her nickname stuck and she’s been in and out of the news for a year. In court, her lawyer claimed her 19-year-old client had been diagnosed with ADHD, and that “she never intended to get any social media attention.”
Right. So that whole charade of dragging the patio chair across the balcony, positioning herself close enough to the railing, looking to the camera as if to say, “Are you getting this?” and then launching the chair so the camera could follow it descend toward the Gardiner, was not intended for us to see. No. She wasn’t aspiring for her 15 seconds of fame.
A year later (almost to the day), an aspiring rap singer aboard a commercial flight bound for Jamaica informed the crew he was suffering from symptoms of the coronavirus. Only he admitted quickly afterward that his intentions wereto have the incident go viral on social media to give his media profile a boost.
Well, the 28-year-old rapper got his wish, causing the airline crew to turn the jet around and return to Toronto, where police charged him with mischief. He even ticked off his mother.
“We do not encourage these kinds of posts to engage in social media,” she said, “and (he) will have to answer for his behaviour.”
I guess what saddens me most is that this guy’s mother couldn’t administer such a reality check when her son was much younger. He had to stoop to feigning symptoms of a lethal virus that has killed a thousand people in China, all to gain notoriety on an internet that, in turn, hasn’t the decency to enforce rules of common sense on its abusers either.
Indeed, social media encourages even worse behaviour – hate crime, inciting violence, exploiting children and live-streaming crime. Ray Surette, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida calls this “performance crime.”
“There is no IQ test for being on social media,” he told a Toronto Star reporter.
And if you think the lack of intelligence testing is limited to chair throwers and mid-air con artists, you might have to look a little higher up the ladder of authority and responsibility. One of our esteemed appointees to Canada’s red chamber has indulged in equally ridiculous behaviour online.
Last year, an independent Senator refused to remove racist letters about Indigenous people from her website. Nor would she agree to apologize for them. After the Senate ethics committee learned that her website argued that First Nations victims of Canada’s residential school system should be “grateful” for the experience, she went even further, claiming falsely that she had Métis bloodlines.
But if the perpetrators are guilty, so too, I think, are the media they use to deliver their message. When will owners and operators of the most powerful communications platforms in the history of civilization recognize some responsibility? When will they learn to police the applications they endorse and profit from? How do they not understand the concept of editing for taste, balance and behaviour within the law?
In contrast to all this performance crime online, to be balanced myself, I offer one positive use of social media. In recent days, you may have seen the post that a Scarborough man placed on Facebook. Ron Arsenault had seen a posting about a Second World War veteran in the U.S.
Jim South had asked friends and acquaintances to send him notes on the eve of his 100th birthday back in October last year. Well, Ron knew that his father, also a Canadian Second World War veteran, was fast approaching his 100th birthday (on March 6), so why not invite people to wish his dad, Fred Arsenault, well.
“(Fred) always had a thing for mail,” Ron Arsenault told the Toronto Star. And being pretty much a shut-in, “he’d really get a kick out of it.”
I’m proud to say that the birthday card I sent Fred has joined thousands in his mailbox at Sunnybrook Veterans’ Centre in Toronto. Proof that social media can be put to good use.
As for eliminating or at least curbing the performance criminals, it appears we’ll have to wait for the courts to deal with “chair girl” and “virus faker” and the Senate ethics committee to deal with one of its own. Clearly the social media platform operators can’t face such responsibility.
And the rest of us are left to judge them all by not rebroadcasting their names across the world wide web.