Amid coronavirus, social media plays outsized role. Let’s play cards with our kids instead
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, my wife and I were filled with joy. We were driving home from an ultrasound appointment that confirmed she was pregnant with our first child.
Joy quickly turned to horror, though, as we turned on the car radio and heard the news that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. It was my day off, but I rushed into the office to help cover the biggest story in my newspaper career.
The weeks that followed were filled with 12-hour days of nonstop, all-out, nothing-but coverage of the terrorist attacks of 9-11. The only thing that kept me sane was the ability to come home and unplug, disconnect from work for a little while.
This may seem hard to imagine, but we didn’t have social media. No Twitter, no Facebook. And get this: no smartphones.
Kelcie Moseley-Morris, who was a reporter at the Idaho Press-Tribune when I was the editor there, is expecting her first child in August. She concedes there have been positive aspects of social media in the current coronavirus crisis, but it also comes with downsides.
“In today’s world, it can be both,” she told me by phone. “It can be used for positive, and it can create panic.”
Interestingly enough, Moseley-Morris also contracted the swine flu when she was a student at the University of Idaho in 2009. The differences between then and now are stark.
Back then, even though the swine flu was sweeping the nation, and there was a bad outbreak next door at Washington State University, Moseley-Morris said the prevalent attitude at UI was nonchalance.
“People were casual about it,” she said. “Most students were nonchalant. At 22, I still thought I was pretty invincible.”
At the time, social media was still in its early years, featuring baby photos or pictures of what you were eating for dinner. Social media wasn’t yet being used as a 24-hour news feed.
Today, Moseley-Morris said she sees the good of social media, but she also sees the panic, the scenes of empty grocery store shelves and people planning to turn their backyards into a mini-farm to feed themselves.
“I had horrible anxiety at first,” she said. “All day, it felt like everything was falling apart. It seems like social media is so serious now. …. I already have anxiety. I struggle with it. Sometimes, social media helps, but it also adds to the frenzy of my mind.”
Is social media helping or hurting the public amid the coronavirus pandemic?
“The information, itself, is all over the map,” said Mike Johansson, teacher of social media and journalism at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. I used to work with Johansson at the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper in Rochester in the early 2000s, at the time of the 9-11 attack. He’s since become an expert in social media, advertising and all things media.
Johansson said he’s less worried today about fake news or intentional misinformation.
“People seem to be a little more cautious about sharing without checking the veracity of a story or a source,” Johansson said. “I think we’re coming out of our teenage years with social media. We’re maturing in how we use social media.”
What he’s seeing more of, particularly in the current coronavirus story, is conflicting information from reputable, authoritative sources. He cited the example of Vice President Mike Pence saying the situation is under control and at the same time National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease director Anthony Fauci saying the situation was serious and not under control.
I’ve seen it firsthand with differing expert opinions on whether social distancing includes hanging out with friends. You see it with varying reports of mortality rates. You see it with opposing recommendations on whether to shut down schools, businesses or the Legislature.
And you see it all the time, from one post to the next.
“It’s like the soapbox on the corner of Hyde Park in London with two people just yelling at each other,” Johansson said. “It’s like the village square but in the real village square, people knew who to listen to and they knew who the village idiot was. Today, the problem is that we don’t know who’s a village idiot or a panic artist.”
Last week, a student in my introduction to journalism class at Boise State University, summed it up: “I’m just tired of always being in panic mode all the time.”
As Johansson points out, and as I wrote in a column earlier about a series of Facebook pages that have sprung up, social media is very good at connecting people to services and connecting needs with those who can help, as Johansson puts it, “what do you got, what do you need?” People are offering to pick up groceries and deliver them to those who don’t want to or can’t be in public. People who have extra infant formula are sharing with those who have run out.
Johansson also pointed out that social media helps people to stay connected at a time of social distancing.
In times of crisis like this there seems to be a tendency to want to check the latest updates every moment, and social media certainly makes that easy. But it’s not necessarily a good thing to be constantly checking for updates.
“If you spend all day only paying attention to people constantly panicking and posting, ‘The end is nigh,’ then that’s what you’re going to be feeling,” Johansson said. “If you’re prone to panic and anxiety, then social media is probably not the best place for you to be.”
Rather than sit in our living room and look at our phones, my wife and I have started going for walks at night, just before sunset. We’ve been playing card games with our boys in the evenings.
However tempting it is to check the latest update, I’m finding that I’m getting back to that habit I developed in the aftermath of 9-11: unplug and disconnect from the world for a while.