Before I listened to the podcast You can’t hit unsend: How a Social Media Scandal Unfolded at Harvard, my feelings were plateau. The tittle mentioned unsend, which sounds to me like another story about someone accidentally sending the wrong email. It didn’t seem like a big problem since most people know that they cannot hit unsend once an email has been sent. But I was completely wrong, it meant so much more than just a simple email being sent to the wrong person since this had affected this boy’s life and future.
This podcast had intersectionality on social media, race, disability, and historical trauma. It touched on every topic that was close to home that I just have to respond. I had to take a day to think this over and reanalyze the information that was given to me. I want to understand why he did such a thing. The podcast was about a high school boy being in small private group chat that shared offensive memes about disability, race, historical trauma and more controversial topics. The rules of being in the private chat was that in order for someone to be a member, they would have to send an offensive meme to another sub-group chat in order for them to be a part of the private chat. The boy continued doing this since he felt that it was funny, which made me thought of Turkle’s (2015) research of students not feeling empathy when they are communicating through a screen versus in person. Turkle (2015) mentions that people “understand each other less” (4) when they are touching their phone or are paying more attention to their electronics than the person. I can’t help but agree with Turkle, that none of them thought from the first offensive meme that it was hurtful and then someone decided to create another exclusive group chat. According to Lanigan (2009) “Americans spend an average of 15.3 hours online” (588). That means there are less physical interaction with people since they are always using their phone. This could explain why non of the members in the group chat seem to find the offensive memes to be disturbing or harmful. This group chat was then discovered by Harvard University and his acceptance letter along with his scholarship was declined.
In this generation, technology is expanding and almost everyone needs some type of technology that helps them function for the day. For example, my internet was down for a week and I could not get anything done other than using my phone with unlimited data. I also noticed that it went from having access to my personal items to me studying at a public library and even with a small change like that I wasn’t comfortable to use my social media accounts at a public library. It felt like my privacy was no longer private once I stepped out. According to Lanigan’s (2009) research “61.8% of American households owns computers, and 86.7% of those households access the Internet” (588). There is a bigger number of people having access to the internet than people owning a laptop. This is a little scary, and it makes me think of the privacy that people don’t have from having access to the internet and posting things on social media. It also made me thought of how Harvard could possibly find this private group chat and thinking back to his story. They had to post it onto another chat and that is where the privacy of the chat ended. I’m assuming that some people saw it and thought it was offensive and sent it to someone, and assuming that it was sent on their profile name shows that this person purposely sent the offensive memes.
Although, I do not condone his behavior I feel that he was not treated fairly. I still feel uncomfortable by his actions and response to the offensive memes but I don’t think he should be punished from something that he did in high school. This also made me question why some people on campus wouldn’t get kicked out if they had a scandal but they were suspended or given a punishment of writing an apology letter. As Turkle (2015) mentions “there is the magic of the always available elsewhere” (2) and it is the attention that makes it comforting for people to want to respond to the group chat. I also understand that this was done in “private” which means that they did not want to share these meme’s with the larger social media platform. This is coming from a group of teenagers in high school that wanted to make connections with friends and felt like he had done it through sharing offensive memes. Therefore I felt like he was being treated unfairly by the universities since almost all of the colleges had rejected his application.
References
Lanigan, J., D., (2009, October 21). “Marriage and Family Review.” Taylor & Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080
Turkle, S. (2015, September 26). “Stop googling. Let’s talk.” New York Times.
Vedantam, S., Schmidt, J., Kwerel, K., Boyle, T., Cohen, R., & Arablouei, R. (2019, September 9). “You Can’t Hit Unsend: How a Social Media Scandal Unfolded at Harvard ” National Public Radio.
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