emotionless weapon

(Baonghean) - While surfing the Facebook homepage, a friend sent me a link via private message with the "invitation": "Come in and wait, who knows, in a few days you might become the center of attention of the online community, no joke!". I clicked on it: it turned out to be a clip of a girl who didn't look very pretty singing a cover of a popular song. The number of views and comments increased quite quickly, most of them satirizing the character in the clip. But what caught my attention the most was the number of shares of the clip.

Curiosity seems to be an ineradicable human instinct. I remember when I was a kid, wherever I saw a crowd gathering, I would insist that my parents take me to see it. Sometimes it was a cockfight, sometimes it was a nice car, but sometimes it was a road accident. Of course, when I was old enough to understand what an accident meant, I also knew that it was not something for people to gather around to look at, point at, and gossip about like a performance on stage. Perhaps not only me, but everyone understands that inevitability. But the truth is that people often succumb to their curiosity, and every time there is an accident or something bad, we quickly see a crowd forming and only disperse a long time later.

Why are people curious? Perhaps even philosophers have to shake their heads in defeat before this primitive question. The oldest legends, such as the story of Pandora's box, have recorded curiosity as a part of the definition of humanity, the root cause of evil in human society. On the one hand, curiosity represents a legitimate need for information, for connection with the time and space in which we live. But on the other hand, when that curiosity goes too far, it is a sign of a lack in life - of purpose, perspective, knowledge or ideals - leading people to compensate for that gap with somewhat extreme, excessive scrutiny.

Returning to the story of the clip that my friend shared, I still wonder what watching, commenting and sharing harmless information that is not related to us can bring us? But more seriously, it is not just neutral information but also highly personal information. By sharing in bulk, commenting rudely attacking someone we have never even met, we have unintentionally turned someone's life into hell. A click, a few seconds of typing on the keyboard, we think that these are harmless gestures, but imagine, if one day you wake up and see the whole world - even if it is just a virtual world - is pointing its spear at you, can you not feel terribly attacked?

When I was a child and was scolded by my parents, I cried only to “put up a fight” but never because of the question “What did I do wrong that my parents scolded me?”. So those tears were just fleeting like a summer shower and the sadness of children often dried up quickly. But the girl in the clip above will certainly ask herself many times “Why?”, and the extreme, excessive attacks of netizens will at some point make her think that she was really wrong. Right or wrong, after all, it turns out that it was just to relieve her idleness to the point of “doing evil”, is that too ridiculous?

But no, that is not only ridiculous, it is heartless to the point of being inhumane. If it is possible to kill a person by erasing their name from history, denying their existence, then mass attacks - even in the virtual world - are equally powerful. The ability to spread information in the digital age is a wonderful tool, but please do not use it as a weapon without feeling.

Hai Trieu