Have You Noticed?

Facebook has become a very powerful medium indeed. Case in point, it showed up on my wall two days ago that a friend of mine was tagged in a photo by a blogshop owner showcasing her new stock. I was intrigued, and I clicked on the photo, and voila, fell in love with one of the products. :)

So I hopped into the blogshop and proceeded to make the proper transactions.

I haven't had the urge to shop online in months, and I have never heard of this blogshop before. Yet, with the simple act of tagging one of my friends in the picture, she somehow ended up with one new customer.

So it's no surprise that a lot of people are utilizing this commodity to the fullest.
Jomgig has even created a contest to attract people, using Facebook as it's medium and I honestly think that it's one really smart idea. Congrats to whoever who made the contest happen. :p BTW, go here if you happen to feel like winning a camcorder or some ipod shuffles.



What I do want to talk about here is how it's being misused. Of late, I've noticed an onslaught of hate pages popping up like mushrooms. If someone makes a mistake by speaking their minds, you can be sure someone else will sniff it out just like a hound dog, and create a page to ban/delete/petition that person off facebook.

It's all well and good to be intolerant of racism and pure rudeness, but creating these fan pages attract the worse kind of people. People who think it's ok to counter these racist and rude remarks with more racism and rudeness. So if it's not ok for the person who did it, why do they think its ok for them?

The way I see it, there are two types of offenders:

The first type is someone who is just out to get attention.
I firmly believe that the boy (yes, he's a boy, which explains it)who recently came into the limelight because of his atrocious comments on a recently deceased comedian is just trying to get attention. And congratulations to him, he got it because all these people who don't know the meaning of trolling are flooding to the masses to his hate page and condemning the heck out of him with even more hateful remarks. Not too smart, eh?

Type number two are people who spoke out of anger at a certain situation without thinking of the repercussions. Which means that they might have meant what they said at the time, but only because they were ruled by strong feelings of anger, or remorse or sadness or annoyance. I remember how some people of a certain religion got offended by what this girl said out of anger on Facebook (admittedly, what she said was very racist and extremely insolent, but she was driven by the chaos that was going on at the time). They created a hate page, demanding an apology from her, calling her all kinds of names. She gave them what they wanted and apologised. Did they stop hating on her?

No.

How do you deal with type 1? Ignore them, because once they've milked all the attention they can out of the controversy they made, they'll probably shut up. All they want is their 15 minutes of fame, and the best we can all do is simply by NOT GIVING IT TO THEM.

As for type 2, leave them alone lah. They realise their mistake and frankly speaking, talking about burning down their houses or beating them to a pulp or worse, raping them so their husbands will get disgusted at them and not touch them (this really is a comment I saw on one hate page) really doesn't make you a better person.