Transcriber: Peter van de Ven Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
So, at risk of sounding like another jaded millennial,
I absolutely love social media hashtags.
I'm actually very serious.
If you guys are not yet in on the trend of hashtags,
you have got to get started.
Formerly known to us all as the digit symbol thingy,
hashtags have become a way to establish universal trends
in terms of what everybody is talking about online.
There are weekly recurring ones,
like #TBT,
which stands for Throwback Thursday,
where users can literally affix any event from their past from
and re-share it with friends,
like this user who just happens to be throwing it back to last week in Miami
when he was at a concert.
There are also politically inspired ones,
like you all know,
such as #ScareHillaryin4Words -
which is amazing.
You really can get lost
in the comedic abyss that the Internet has become over the years.
The point, of course,
is that once a hashtag is used enough times by enough people,
it is described as trending worldwide.
And that really is one of the most amazing things about the Internet today,
that we have this means
of communicating with people from all over the world.
It's spurred an era
of what I like to refer to as digital activism.
An example of this occurred on November 13th, 2015,
when the city of Paris was struck by a series of horrific terrorist events
you will all recall.
It was actually due to the speed of the Internet and its associated hashtags
that we received real-time coverage of those events.
And individuals began using that #PrayforParis
to send love and support to all of the victims.
And the beauty of something like that is pretty hard to ignore, right? -
digital activism as a means to spread the love and support throughout the world.
It really is amazing that in this day and age,
we need but push a button to demand change.
We don't even have to leave our bedrooms to inspire the political climate.
But you have to wonder,
Is that always necessarily a good thing?
A colleague of mine presented a very interesting question
when she asked me,
"Have you ever noticed
how issues seem to sweep through social media like hurricanes
and then recede almost as quickly as they came?"
She was absolutely right, of course.
I couldn't think of a single one of my friends
who used that #PrayforParis beyond the first couple of days
before they were onto the next social issue
that required their immediate, aggressive attention -
because we need to know,
Is Tom Brady guilty of #Deflategate?
And, I mean, are the #OscarsSoWhite?
And for the love of God, people,
is Donald Trump
a #RACIST, #SEXIST, #VICTIM, #HERO,
the next president of the United States or Hitler?
I don't know.
Because it's here today and it will be gone tomorrow.
Welcome to this generation of activism.
I'm an eternal optimist, though,
and so I'd like to think
that even if the conversation does seem to die down pretty quickly,
we're at least being inspired by the conversation and the dialogue
that we're having with individuals
that we would not have had access to otherwise.
We're thereby widening our own range of perception and ideals -
I'd like to think.
Except I personally know
that there is an element of this digital activism that we don't often consider.
Because although so many of us
are willing to spread and share our opinions and ideas rapidly,
how many of us have ever been on the receiving end
of those views being rapidly expressed?
It always tends to be a little bit more of an exclusive club.
But yes, in February of 2007, when I was a senior in high school,
I became a social issue
while I was sitting on my couch watching a Will Ferrell movie.
My phone began ringing that night,
and when I saw that the phone calls were private,
I sent it to voicemail.
At the conclusion of the movie,
I noticed that I had four missed voicemails,
and when I went to listen to them,
I was horrified by what I would discover.
I heard four male voices, and they were alternating -
they were sometimes screaming, they were sometimes laughing,
and they were even at certain points singing -
and here are a few excerpts
of some of the things that were being said to me.
If there is a way to summarize it, in short,
they told me that they were going to kill me.
They told me things
like they were going to tar and feather my family,
that they were going to put a bullet in the back of my head
as they had done to Martin Luther King.
They told me, in so many words, that I'd better not be home.
I was absolutely traumatized,
and in terms of action, I didn't really do much.
I'm going to assume that because we're all human beings,
all of you are feeling a certain emotion as you're reading through these messages,
but I'm going to ask you to hold on to your hashtags
as we get through the story.
So, that night I simply cried,
and I remember feeling incredibly confused
because I couldn't think of four individuals,
not even one individual,
that wanted to see me dead.
The next day at school,
I confided what happened to me to my philosophy teacher,
and he was adamant.
He was like, "You do not let this thing go,"
and he marched me into the principal's office.
And when she heard the voicemails,
she had an equally strong reaction,
and she made the quick decision to phone the police.
And that was the beginning
of what would become a very dark period of my life
because I was absolutely correct in my assessment
that there were not four individuals that I knew that wanted to see me dead.
In fact, it would turn out that three of those individuals
were complete strangers to me,
and by some random stroke of my own misfortune,
one of those strangers happened to be the current governor of Connecticut's son.
And so the issue very quickly became #politics,
and we all know
that the figurative hurricane swept right on in.
My face was slathered
across the front page of every newspaper throughout the state of Connecticut.
The FBI was called in, due to its unusual strand of high profile,
to analyze the voice messages and the voices on them.
News stations would replay them over and over again
because they wanted to make sure everyone was made privy
to what a politician's son was involved in.
I also had NAACP members, who I had never spoken to prior,
waiting on the front steps of my high school,
with cameras in tow,
to speak out on the horrors of what a black girl was going through.
My parents fought at home.
My sisters got into physical altercations at school,
defending me against all the chatter
that was drummed up by students and teachers alike
because, as we all know,
in any of these types of situations, everyone feels a need to take a side.
And maybe Candace made up the voice messages,
maybe she called herself -
no one had been arrested yet; it was just an investigation.
I made the decision then to start homeschooling
while the investigation continued,
and it concluded nearly two months later.
Took two months before all of the boys involved were arrested
and before I was able to return back to school
and my hashtag was allowed to shift into the societal subconscious.
And then, of course, everyone forgot about my story.
Everyone except for me
because a few months later, I started college
and I couldn't rid my brain
of all of those articles that I had read online about me
and all the things that I had read in the comment sections about myself.
I was naturally terrified
that incoming freshman students that could potentially be my friend
would discover these articles
and form presumptive hashtags about my character.
And I certainly didn't want them to think that I was a #RaceBaiter,
that I was #Trouble or hashtag anything else.
But I couldn't control the Internet.
What I did, however, discover
was that I could control my body,
and I began manifesting that experience through severe anorexia,
a disease that would stick with me for the next five years.
This is a photo that was taken of me three years later, in 2010,
and I went on to lose about ten pounds after it was taken.
And if I am being completely honest on this stage right now,
I remember my anorexia very dearly.
I had an affectionate relationship with it;
it was very hard for me to let it go
because it was my best friend for five years.
It gave me control of my life back.
I felt, somehow,
that with every calorie that I avoided,
I was also avoiding the problems from my past.
And those problems, retrospectively,
could have been solved if somebody had just said sorry
and taken responsibility for what had happened,
which never happened.
It's an incredibly interesting afterthought to have
that our digital activism over these perceived acts of inhumanity
can itself become the act of inhumanity,
that as a society we tend to drum up these hurricanes
to combat what may initially have just been a storm.
That's because the method of activism has morphed completely.
When our parents and our grandparents were coming up,
that word required a physical presence.
They had to march on the front lawns of the White House
to put an end to the Vietnam War.
They had to risk their livelihoods
to put an end to institutions like segregation.
Activism meant maybe being arrested, activism meant maybe being killed,
so they had to care deeply,
beyond the concept of a trending hashtag,
to voice their outrage.
But today we have the Internet,
and the Internet is fast and the Internet is amazing,
but it doesn't exactly require a physical presence,
and it therefore allows us a level of detachment.
Which is why when I bring myself back into that circumstance
and back into high school,
I always ask myself,
Could any of those children have said any of those words to my face?
Better yet,
What would have been the outcome, even, had I just picked up the phone?
It is so easy to yell at an object because objects don't have emotions,
people do.
Had I picked up the phone,
they would have heard my voice -
a voice of a real human being carrying real emotion -
and it would have stopped them in their tracks.
It would have tethered them to their own humanity.
All of those emotions you had when you first read those messages,
I'm going to politely ask you to just forget about them.
Because the truth is those children were not monsters,
those children were not #Racist or anything else,
those children, like me, were social lab rats.
People tend to forget it,
but it was us millennials
that watched the world move from a beeper to a cell phone
to text messages and videos
sent around the world in what felt like a matter of nanoseconds.
You see that green line
that just starts trending upward right around 2012?
That represents the increase in core digital technologies over the years.
It was us millennials
that were the schoolchildren of those technological advancements.
We were the unwitting participants in a great social experiment.
We were first handed AIM,
and then it was Facebook and Twitter and hashtags,
with no formal guide as to how it might all play out
because nobody knew.
Nobody thought about it.
Nobody considered or contemplated
the social implications of all of these changes.
I still don't actually think people are contemplating
the social implications of all of these changes.
We are all existing in a miraculous paradox.
As a human race, we have never been more connected
or further apart from one another.
Those children, just like me, were publicly dissected and labeled
by a group of adults who saw a sweeping headline
instead of an opportunity to learn and to think critically
about the approaching era of digital activism,
where we write off empathy in favor of proving a point,
a point that we are oftentimes making about a human being
with real emotions and a beating heart.
And yes,
the example I presented you today may seem extreme,
but it more usually, you should know, is not.
It's more usually that one-star review we leave on Yelp
because the waitress was #Awful
and she was late with our drinks and she maybe forgot our appetizers,
so she should be #Fired,
and, oh, wait until you see her nose.
We type, hit Enter, send, done -
for us maybe, but not necessarily for that waitress.
What digital activism feels like on the other side
is a lot of pain.
It can be half a decade of an eating disorder.
It can be suicidal thoughts.
It can be just an individual
that isn't equipped to deal with our criticisms.
is that it's hardly activism at all.
It's rapid-rate opinionism.
I have noticed
that it's that send button on the keyboard,
it's the Enter key,
that seems to be getting all of the attention from us,
and so I thought while I have the opportunity to,
on this stage,
why don't I present to the world a few alternatives to it,
like the Control one
or the Delete one.
And I thought, now that might be a hashtag worth spreading.
[#ControlDelete]
Thank you guys so much.