Social Media Case Reflection 1

    The power of being able to respond and being responded to seems to have a much faster and deeper impact than it used to even just a few decades ago. The IndyStar article related to the Kilroy case has received a great deal of attention and does a great job of reminding us that event that might've been considered much more extreme or dramatic wouldn't have even received attention by more than just a few hundred people back before Facebook had its 1 billion + users and daily checking and updating.

The big fallout and follow up stories that cover the incident have a similar underlining quality to them. The Daily News website make the points that the woman who had complained in the bar initially had since been fired from her job, terminated her Facebook profile and wasn't open to comment for reporters. Then another follow-up article done this time by Fox News mentioned the same facts related to her job, Facebook and willingness to comment.

The follow-up article seems to really being playing to the emotional revenge that America apparently wants to see have happen to the complainer. All the articles related have this strong sense of, "look, everyone, we got justice for that jerk who complained about the heart attack victim." It's easy to see why that would be a playing point for the news outlets because they wanted bring in all of the Facebook community that was following this story and wanted that sweet moment of victory. It's kind of like that moment in a movie or TV show where the annoying villain or annoying character, villain or friend, finally get punched in the face or yelled at and the room cheers internally or in some cases audibly.

The feel the internet is trying to give is that the symbolic punch has been thrown and Ms Jones (the complainer) has fallen to the ground and landed in her own self-loving filth. Admittedly there is a part of me that would throw myself into the group of internal cheering fans to some degree but then a single word in the Daily News article crept its way in plain sight to the title of their article that reads,
Indiana woman who threw fit at bar while another patron was having heart attack let go from her job at salon....  And I was left wondering, "wait, what?" At what point did this conversation start making a point to explain the woman was Indian? Now granted, there really wasn't a lot of content that link anything of her ethnicity to the results of the incident, but the title just left me wondering if there was any kind of motive behind the intentional insertion of her Indian background. 

Of course, any online news source is going to make sure and grab as many readers as possible. But the story itself has enough emotion to drag a reader into the details of everything that happened. Several of the questions that seemingly haven't been answered (at least not through the article I've read) are related to what her friends are thinking about it. She was there paying for a $700 tab and I would hope all 700 of those dollars didn't go to her own New Year's drinking game. Do the other people at the table share their opinion with her, or did they try and calm her down in the first place? What do her friends think of how everything worked out? It could be possible that someone might defend her and explain how out of character all of this was for her. 

I thought of a recent episode of "The Middle" about a midwest family that leads a fairly simple life. In this particular episode the dad decides to start getting into social media and sets up a twitter account. At one point, while selling these diapers that allow a baby to "poop" on a teams logo (obviously it would be a team you don't like) the dad responds to a tweet someone had commented about how much they don't like the diapers. Eventually the dialogue builds and conversation becomes a huge twitter battle involving a university and the dad. This is just a perfect example of a sweeter, nicer, version of the Kilroy incident. What started off as a disagreement between two relatively small parties it just blew up into a nation wide debate. In the TV show the medium was Twitter and in Kilroy it was, of course, Facebook. However, thanks to social media, the results can be the same and now anyone can get involved.




http://fox59.com/2016/01/08/woman-who-posted-facebook-rant-about-ruined-new-years-eve-at-indianapolis-bar-no-longer-with-salon/



 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/woman-threw-fit-patron-heart-attack-job-article-1.2489904