Marthese Portelli’s fossil-excavation jaunt and the subsequent fallout serve to highlight the perils of Facebook – or rather – of people’s tendency to upload anything and everything online. The shadow minister for the environment shared photos of her family walking along the Baħrija cliffs. One showed her son chisselling away at the rock face. Which wouldn’t matter much really, but it so happens that fossil-excavation is illegal. Granted, it’s no biggie in the grand scheme of things and I doubt that any T-Rex fossils were lost to posterity, but still mildly embarassing for the shadow minister.
It also attracted unwanted attention that could have been avoided – primarily by not chipping out any fossils but also by resisting the urge to share family moments on the World Wide Web. I just don’t get this obsession with sharing practically every single experience online. It’s almost as if the experience would not have taken place unless the obligatory selfie is posted online for viewers to pass the standard comments (‘Amazing’ or the super-clichéd ‘Beautiful inside and out’).
I just don’t get this obsession with sharing practically every single experience online
I think it’s a bit sad that people can’t get on with enjoying their lives without receiving external confirmation that they look great/fantastic. When I read certain comments of a deeply personal nature or catch sight of photographs that should be treasured but not necessarily gawped at by online acquintances, I shudder at this self-inflicted loss of privacy.
More to the point, over-divulging exposes people to the constant scrutiny of quasi-strangers and to their comments and judgement. This is fine if you’re self-assured and can take what others dish out, but it’s mostly undesirable and unnecessary.
• The OPM denied that there were any plans afoot to build a mosque with a view at the Żonqor site granted to the Sadeen group. Cue – a sigh of relief from some Labour supporters. Not that they’re Islamophobes or racist or anything like that. But they had objected mightily to the application for the building of a Church school on an ODZ site. They may have been accused of acting in a blindly partisan and inconsistent fashion if they had not objected to the mosque and university attachment after having objected to the Church school.
The difference between the two is that the Sadeen project will charge fees and is approved of by the Labour government, whereas the Church school will not charge fees for its Maltese students. We can all reach our own conclusions as to why Labour supporters objected to the latter so vehemently but welcomed the Sadeen project.
• If you blinked you’d have missed it. The news report about the Ebola-infected individual in one of the busiest health centres on the island. ‘Informed sources’, or maybe it was simply ‘sources’, told the Maltarightnow online news portal that the person who was apparently infected was at the Mosta health clinic. With no further ado this was uploaded and the unattributed report told us that further updates would be forthcoming.
A tabloid-style exclamation mark rounded off the headline of the piece in time-honoured alarmist fashion. Readers – especially those who were in the area – were left wondering whether they could have contracted the killer disease. Since no other news outfit seemed to be in the loop and there was no announcement from more official bodies such as the Health Department, the only way of knowing whether an Ebola pandemic was potentially in the offing, was to log onto the news portal.
But then something odd happened. The article informing us of our imminent wipe-out disappeared from view. The link to the piece was broken and an ‘Ooops’ told readers they were looking in vain. I suppose all’s well that ends well, and no (further) news is good news. It turns out that we do not have a medical emergency on our hands. What we do have on our hands is a sorry lack of standards insofar as journalistic ethics are concerned.
I realise that social media has ratcheted up the pressure to produce news items, and that if you’re not the first out with a scoop you might just as well not publish anything. But there are limits to what should be published without verification from reputable sources. This report could have generated mass hysteria and led to people who really needed to avail themselves of the services of the health centre to go elsewhere, thereby clogging up the health system. Granted, it’s the silly season and news is (somewhat) sluggish, but there are always the Kardashians/ Malta in times past/lampuki recipes to fill in those empty white spaces.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt