Dr David Bratt
Social media is mauvais langue. Gossip. Technology-aided mauvais langue. Intensely international and supremely Trini.
Humans are social animals. Inquisitive and always wanting to find out things about others. The social media system may run smoother and faster but it’s no different from my grandmother’s front window system at Kew Place, Port-of-Spain. After tea and the end of the day’s work at 4 o’clock, Ma Bratt would position herself at that window, looking out over the street, where she could monitor both the daily funeral procession from Rosary or Sacred Heart Churches to Lapeyrouse Cemetery and who walking who home after work, who watching who walk home and who picking up who. To her right and left, other ladies with nothing to do, also kept watch at their windows. Then talk would start. Back and forth, each little bit of information adding to the excitement. By 6 pm, stories would have been established and embellished and moved on down the road into Lapeyrouse where even the dead must have rolled over, feeling the bite of my grandma and her neighbour’s tongues.
By the time the sun set behind Sacred Heart RC School, beyond the four stacks of the T&TEC power station on Wrightson, everybody knew the story of everybody. The street was like an open-air beauty parlour. A big place for gossip.
Ma Bratt and her next-door neighbours and those ladies along Kew Place, from Park Street to Phillip Street, constituted a social gossiping network the likes of which for sure must have existed in those Dunbar groups of 30 to 50 related people, roaming the plains of Africa years ago.
Social media is the new place for mauvais langue, the new beauty parlour. But tremendously more powerful. Faster. More bite. Far more influential. Deadlier. More poisonous. More harmful. And worst of all, more captivating, the mind being pathologically impressed by what it sees or hears or to a lesser extent, reads, on social media. Mauvais langue excites the same centres of the brain as any mind-altering drug.
And because of social media, gossip now reaches or is discussed, not by 30 to 50 people who know each other or at least know of each other, and know about their biases, but by thousands of people of all sorts and cultures and tastes and opinions, and who don’t know each other’s biases all over the world and within minutes opinions are hastily formed or reinforced.
It’s much more difficult to impress people face to face. Firstly, they know you. They have heard all the tata you talk. Secondly, people are remarkable body language readers. It’s difficult to fool people face to face. They know when people are lying. Thirdly, back-and-forth nuanced discussion is impossible with social media and mistaken conclusions are common.
So for example, a survey by King’s College London and the BBC last month revealed that almost one-quarter of the UK’s population believe COVID was a hoax.
And, “About a third of the population are convinced that the cost of living crisis is a government plot to control the public, and similar numbers think ‘15-minute cities,’ an attempt to increase walking in neighbourhoods, are a government surveillance ruse, and that the ‘great replacement theory,’ the idea that white people are being replaced by non-white immigrants, is happening.”
It found that the role of social media was paramount in spreading this mauvais langue, most commonly “YouTube and Facebook, and fuelled by websites including 21st Century Wire, The Light, The Exposé and Breitbart.” Social media were the most likely places for people to first encounter conspiracy theories, which often develop out of real-world problems and anxieties.
This could explain the most recent, local, social media-inspired conspiracy theory ie, that the Ministry of Education is involved in a massive push to include 2SLGTBQIA+ material in schools. This would include instructing teachers to examine the genitals of children to determine their sex, introducing questionnaires quizzing children about their sexuality and gender identity, and teaching material containing multiple references to gay people, without there being a single shred of evidence in this tiny society of ours, where as soon as Tantie Merle down the street throw Uncle Desmond out, the whole of town knows!
Adults presumably know and can make up their own minds, yet our minds can be massaged to believe anything. Imagine what social media is doing to immature minds. For one, adolescents who use social media for more than three hours daily are at double the risk for depression. Turns out that about half of all teens are online almost constantly, on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok.
