Transcriber: Pedro Magosso Reviewer: Seray Türkyılmaz
Their careers are more fragile, their reputations are more fragile
and they don't want to take risks.
An ominous quote from Sir Kazuo Ishiguro,
a celebrated author and 2017 Nobel Prize winner for the Literature Award.
During an interview with the BBC,
he discussed the future of young authors who self-censor out of
the fear of being cancelled.
As a musician myself, I can relate to that hesitation of knowing what you want
to put in your work, but being afraid of how that message may be received.
As creatives, we tend to comment on society through our art
and are therefore seen as thought leaders.
As a Kendrick Lamar fan, I was shocked when the internet tried to criticize
the silence during the George Floyd protests.
His song, All Right, had become the unofficial anthem of
the Black Lives Matter movement, and he had attended said protests.
He’d kept his presence a secret or
the down low just to avoid taking attention away from the main cause.
This made me question the loyalty of social media,
as you can be celebrated in one moment and then demonized in the next.
What does it mean to be a leader in the digital age,
and are our future leaders now destined to be cancelled?
The irony is that the term cancelling comes from another movement
for social change.
Musician R. Kelly had been accused of
and has now been convicted of using his status as a celebrity
to take advantage of underage women.
The call to cancel R. Kelly asked for fans to boycott his concerts
and to stop listening to his music to reduce his power and wealth.
The movement started off with good intentions,
but was adopted by the internet and morphed into something
a little more complicated. As with all tools, with the potential for good.
What's important is the intention behind them and how they're used.
In this digital era, it's very important that we start to look at what leadership
looks like online.
In her book Mindful Leadership,
Maria Gonzalez states that to be an effective leader of others,
one must first practice self-leadership.
This is an awareness that allows us to take responsibility
for the things that we do and the things that we say,
because all of these things have impact and influence on those around us.
I believe we all have the potential to be a leader for a cause we believe in.
I'll now borrow three main traits from a book to show how we can be
so good leadership online.
The first trait is being aware, going back to the idea of mindfulness.
This allows us to take responsibility for our actions and our thoughts.
To be a leader is not to be without fault,
but to be able to admit when we have hurt or cause wrongdoing
and do our best to correct that.
Quite often, we're tempted to run to social media platforms
and vent our frustration.
But it’s important to think about the long term effect
of emotionally charged reactions.
For example, posting someone's personal details can be endangering to them
and their family, especially if it's something like an address.
The best leaders lead with an open heart and a clear mind.
As an artist, as K the Chosen,
I try to promote conversations for change
by including music that looks at different people’s experiences.
I did this by volunteering with different organizations that did work around
consent, bystander intervention and sexual assault.
This was important to me as quite often Hip-Hop is looked at as
a misogynistic genre. Yet I knew that the women in my life had told me to value
and respect everyone.
However, being an ally is not just about having values,
you have to present what you say and show it through your actions.
It's not just about saying good things.
Quite often on social media,
it's easy to present a good moral standing without any further action.
And this has come to be known as virtue signalling.
Our values need to be shown, not only in what we say, but also in what we do.
This brings us to the next topic, which is being clear.
A leader is nothing without the followers,
but said followers need to know what and why they're following.
This is especially important in the social media age
where quite often we take clips out of context
or look at posts that are filled with buzzwords.
To create some form of clarity and transparency,
it's important that we exercise two forms of awareness.
The first is internal awareness.
This is thinking about our goals
and what we're trying to achieve when looking at posts or creating posts.
The second is external awareness,
and this would be doing the research before you comment
or share content that you see online.
Pairing these two forms of awareness allow our actions to match with our intentions.
Tarana Burke is a social activist
and a community organizer who began using the phrase “me too” in 2009.
She used the platform MySpace
to promote empowerment through empathy
for women of color who had experienced sexual assault.
She first used the phrase when a 13 year old girl confided in her
and told her about an event that had happened to her.
She was speechless.
She wishes Sydney just said me too.
The hashtag MeToo rose to prominence in 2017,
when used by charmed actress and activist Alyssa Milano.
The campaign was a success and led to the 23-year sentence of Harvey Weinstein,
a Hollywood producer who was found guilty on multiple accounts of sexual assault.
The sheer number of the posts made this movement a success.
But it's important to note that each person put themselves in
a vulnerable place when sharing this story online.
However,
using social media is not the only way that we can start a movement.
We need leaders who are clear and self-aware, but also compassionate.
Compassionate leadership is leadership that has a deep caring
without an emotional attachment to the outcome.
This is important as quite often we want to be empathetic towards those who are
helping and provide them with the resources that they need,
but need to know not to put an expectation on the outcome.
I remember once I attended a Black Lives Matter protest,
and they’re a bit different from the ones that have been going down in the states.
What happened was that we’d been walking along with
the police officers alongside us,
and they were there to help make sure that traffic moves safely,
smoothly and that we were all safe as the protests continued.
The leader of the protest then decided to challenge one of the officers to speak up.
They wanted to know what they had to say about the issue.
It took some time,
but one brave officer eventually stood up and said something to the effect of:
as an officer with the Calgary police force, we stand with you in solidarity.
We will do everything we can to make sure that this never happens again.
Thank you.
The protesters weren’t too impressed, but we carried on.
Speaking to a friend next to me,
I mentioned how, of course, you wanted a more radical response,
but we also had to take into consideration that almost jeopardised
the one person who might have been on our side by singling out one person.
We had no idea how the rest of the force would react to them speaking out
on such a platform.
Compassionate leaders take into account the safety of their allies
and make sure that their safety isn’t compromised
when working together to make change.
It's been a long and tiring year with the ongoing pandemics and
the rising race based violence.
However, social media is here to stay and I believe we can use it as
a tool for change. The mob mentality of the internet,
it's here to stick around as many people can hide behind virtual avatars
and get the support of millions despite what their views may be.
This new environment will challenge you.
Virtue signallers will be called out,
but don’t let the fear of being cancelled stop you.
Your voice and your ideas deserve to be heard.
As long as you're clear, self-aware and compassionate,
you have nothing to fear before you hit send on that tweet or that post.