In an age of social media saturation, the once-promising realm of active citizenship finds itself blunted. Long ago, a theory compared the confessional release of guilt in Catholicism to the higher suicide rates among Protestants. Fast forward to today, South Africa grapples with systemic decay. Social media exposes the nation’s woes, but it also anesthetises collective outrage. Fear of reprisals and narratives labelling truths as falsehoods further muddle the landscape. Will South Africans transcend keyboard activism and unite to shape their own destiny?
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Social Media Blunts Active Citizenship
By Solly Moeng*
I must still find the source of the theory that I heard about many years ago – probably during my university bachelor days – that sought to explain the high prevalence of suicide in protestant communities as opposed to their catholic brethren. Accordingly, so the claim went, more Protestants resorted to killing themselves because they did not have the confession outlet at their disposal that Catholics enjoyed and, therefore, went around carrying more pain of sin or guilt in them that ended driving some of them to suicide.
Catholics, the argument went, had less incidents of suicide because after each confession, they felt less burdened by internalised pain or guilt. Confession was to them almost like taking a spiritual shower or bath and stepping out with a cleaner body to start over. This made sense to me then but, like I said, that was many years ago. I was most probably a lot more impressionable then than I have become with the passage of time. It could also be that the theory, were it true then, can no longer hold today because many things have changed in society, like social media is here and accessible to everyone, broadly.
In political terms, and thinking specifically of South Africa, it seems like while social media platforms have become perfect for sharing news, including fake news, with a bigger audience that goes across country borders, it also provides a false sense of having let things out.
One would have to be supremely blind to have lived in or observed South Africa over the past thirty years and not have noticed the systemic deterioration under ANC misgovernance. This former liberation movement has had thirty years to inject every part of what used to be operationally functioning institutions (even though most of them did not serve all of the country’s population groups equally, thanks to systemic apartheid racial discrimination) with levels of toxic ineptitude that have brought them to their knees, no, scratch that, flat onto their bellies.
All the Afropessimists who would have placed bets in the early 1990s on their fear that it would just be a matter of time before black governed South Africa became like other failing African states, would be smiling all the way to the bank today. The ANC has not let them down.
If you’re beginning to wonder how all this is relevant to the theory about Catholics and Protestants, as well as social media, let me get straight into it. If you’re not already onto them, please get onto Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok and follow conversations about the deteriorating state of life in that country, my country. South Africans know what is going on and what is being done to their country. No one can claim convincingly that they don’t. They know about the high levels of corruption, arrogance, and impunity in political circles, especially in the perennially misgoverning African National Congress. They know that the country has been turned into an Orwellian Animal Farm in which the laws of the land do not apply to the political elite. They know about the deteriorating public infrastructure, electricity and, increasingly, water shortages. They know about high levels of violent crime, including the increasing spates of kidnappings and assassinations. They know about all this and a lot more.
It is thanks, in large part, to social media platforms and to arguably free independent media, that South Africans know about all these things. The problem is not the fact of knowing, it is the numbing effect of it or, more worrisome, the suspicion that many seem to be satisfied that nothing more needs to be done after they have discharged their anger and frustration through the social media outlet. Using their smartphones, they film all forms of crime in action and share the clips on social media through posts expressing outrage or despair, read and watch what others have shared, then move on, until the next fresh content comes along.
Obviously, things are also not as simple as I might be making them to appear. There are also two other elements. The first is fear. People share the stuff they film with the hope that someone else will do something about it. They fear going to open cases with the police because too often nothing comes out of it. They also fear being targeted by the perpetrators of the crime, either at the crime scene or later, when they would have been identified as the ones who reported the matter to the police. There is also fear that some members of the South African Police Services receive bribes from criminals to share information that either weakens their cases in court, if the cases make it there, or prematurely lead to the identity of people who reported them.
The other element is the prevalence of carefully curated narratives that seek to taint everything as fake news driven by faceless people and entities described as “enemies of the revolution” who are out to undo the gains of the said revolution.
So, truth has become a relative term in South Africa. Social media, therefore, offer great platforms to share and read about events in the country and the world, but they also confuse or numb too many people into not taking real action to demand social justice, adherence to the rule of law and the respect of democratic principles, a term that, I acknowledge, has also lost meaning in modern times, as its definition has become politically multi-polarised.
The question prevails nevertheless; will South Africans ever move from keyboard warriorship to uniting in their increasingly, politically, fragilized diversity to not only demand a better deal for themselves and their children, but to be active crafters of such a deal?
Read also:
- Maimane: Hope is mushrooming – SA’s youth will vote for political change in 2024. ANC is done.
- Terrence Corrigan on Maimane’s BOSA: Giving power back to the people
- Taking back the Power: a People’s Summit for a People’s Charter
*Solly Moeng is a South African communication strategist, public speaker, and opinion columnist. He is known for his commentary on various socio-political and economic issues in South Africa and beyond.
