Correction: How Justine Sacco ruined Justine Sacco’s life.
We all make make mistakes, Justine Sacco just happened to make one that ended up trending on Twitter and blowing up her life.
I sympathize for Justine; because I have said some things I regret at some point in my life, had I tweeted it, it could have resulted in the same backlash. But that is where we are different. She tweeted it and I didn’t. It’s almost like magic, the press of a button (tweet) leads to the press of another button (retweet), and then it becomes a never ending of button pushing. It’s something she said she never saw coming, but my question is, why not?
Twitter is a sharing forum, where tweets are supposed to be liked and shared. Justine’s rationale that she didn’t think people would read it is not valid. The only explanation that would make sense would be for someone who doesn’t understand how Twitter works, which also doesn’t make sense because if she has a Twitter, she should know how it works. Although most people deny that they don’t care if people acknowledge their tweets, would any of us ever tweet if it doesn’t have the potential to be liked? Whether we admit it or not, this is the way social media works and survives and the fact that Justine Sacco believed that no one would see her tweet makes her excuse invalid.
Justine didn’t understand how her tweet ended up being shared endlessly because she only had 170 followers, but even just one follower has the potential to reach millions. This is what happened to Justine, just one person, Sam Biddle, got a hold of her comment and shared it with his 15,000 followers. That is why social media is so powerful, because to many of us it seems so un-meaningful, but it surprises us when we least expect it.
Justine’s circumstances were quite unfortunate but the irony of her story is that she makes up so many excuses that so many other factors prove otherwise. The title of the article claims that it was just one tweet that blew up her life, but the tweets leading up to that one proved that it wasn’t just one misunderstood tweet. Her tweets beforehand were just as degrading and tasteless. She was on a streak of indecent tweets about the places she was visiting and the people she encountered. Rather than trying to contemplate why her behavior was wrong, she went on a blaming streak of trying to rationalize why she made that tweet. She claimed that because she lives in America it puts her in a bubble unaware of what is going on in third world countries, but she must have known enough to make fun of them! How is she blaming America for her issues and ignorance? If we were truly in a bubble like she claims, she would not even know about AIDS to make fun of it. We aren’t in a bubble and that is not why she said what she said. It’s a tough situation because she had to deal with so many repercussions for what she said, but the tweet wasn’t stupid, she was stupid.
What comes out of this story and many others is that one tiny mistake, could completely destroy a person’s life. It probably took a lot of hard work and dedication to get to where she was, when her life ‘was ruined’ and it took only one comment on a social media site to end her career, dating life, and her life in New York. She learned the hard way that your actions could define the rest of your life and how you live it. She had to move away from her home, she lost her job and her reputation. Her name will forever be associated with her mistake and it will haunt her for the rest of her life. Many of us fail to understand that although we think we have control over our social media accounts, many things that go on are out of our hands.
What we have to learn from Justine Sacco is that yes, we have the rights and abilities to express ourselves through any sort of medium, but the short time it takes to tweet something, it takes just as little time for it to come back and destroy us.
I think what Jon Ronson was trying to do was to find some sort of deep meaning for why Justine said what she said and how it got so out of hand. She could have come up with a million reason as to why this happened but it’s simple, none of this would have happened if she just put her phone down and kept her thoughts to herself.
