Reflections on the Uses and Abuses of Social Networking

This past couple of weeks have been emotional for me and have had me thinking a lot about the power of social networking on the Internet -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I'll start with the good. I don't know if any of you know about the website http://www.caringbridge.org/? The purpose of Caring Bridge is to provide free websites that enable people who are experiencing serous health issues to connect online with family and friends. When a person is critically ill, family and friends really want to know how this person is doing, and also want to be able to send messages of support. Using a personalized website, which is essentially a blog, provided free (supported by donations) through Caring Bridge, the family can post updates and photos about how the patient is doing, and visitors can leave messages of support.

Although I am a big fan and user of a wide variety of social networking tools (Facebook being my favorite!), until a friend of ours became critically ill a few months ago, I never truly appreciated the importance of social networking in being a life line to some people. When our friend Cathryn was hospitalized and it because clear (a) that she was going to be there for a while and (b) that many friends and family members wanted to know how she was doing and be able to send regular messages of support to her, her daughters and a couple of close friends started a Caring Bridge site for her. Every day, and sometimes twice daily, they would update the site, letting us know the latest on Cathryn's progress. All of us, in turn, were able to send encouragement to Cathryn, her daughters and other care givers (and we also were able to coordinate efforts to help provide donations towards the astronomical cost of her health care).

The outpouring of love and support for Cathryn were a lifeline for her and her caregivers, helping support them on this harrowing journey (during the two months on her illness, her site got nearly 30,000 hits -- and this was just from her network of family and friends!).  They knew we were all there for them, and Cathryn knew that even if we couldn't all visit her in person, we were with her every minute in cyberspace. For those of us unable to make the trip to the Mayo Clinic to visit her, these updates helped more than I ever could have imagined. Even though the news each day was often really hard to read, at least we knew what was going on, right up until the very end (yesterday) when she finally lost her heroic battle. Even now her Caring Bridge site continues as we all use it to show our love and support for her family, reaching out to them in their grief. How different this would be for them, and would have been for Cathryn, had we not had this Caring Bridge connection. Thank you, thank you to Cathryn's daughters and her friends for helping us keep connected. And thank you Caring Bridge for this amazing social networking tool.

And then there is the other side of social networking ... when its power is abused in the most horrific ways, to spread intolerance and prejudice through at best thoughtless, insensitive and deeply painful comments, and at worst intentional and targeted hatred. I was deeply shaken by the tragic suicide of a gay college student, 18 year old Tyler Clementi, who took his life after his roommate used the Internet to post video that he had secretly filmed of Tyler having sex in what Tyler had thought was the privacy of his room. This kind of cyberbullying fills me with horror at how the worse side of people can be unleashed through the power of the Internet. I also know that it is essential that every one of us stand together and speak out to stop this intolerance in its tracks (you can read more about my plea for GLBT people and our allies to speak out in my letter to the UMD Statesman on this issue last week).

I think I'll save my ranting and thoughts about cyberbullying for another blog entry. But I want to end with a plea to everyone out there to take very, very seriously the immense responsibility that comes with our right to free speech and our use of the very powerful social networking tools here in cyberspace. The tools themselves are just tools -- neither good nor evil. They can be used both to save and to end lives. The choice on how we use them is up to us.