The lazy hysteria of social media

WHAT has the historic photo of the black hole got to do with that insatiable appetite for bubble tea? Very little, except a lesson on the bald and banal nature of the Internet.

The Internet was abuzz this month over the first proper image of a black hole, that mysterious circular float swimming in cosmic matter, the awesome formation from what's left of a large star that perished in a supernova explosion.

NASA will tell you that the black hole is equivalent to a star ten times more massive than the sun, which is then squeezed into a sphere the diameter of New York City. It captures a gravitational field so strong that not even light can escape. And now we know it looks like the eye of Sauron.

But the momentous event, the result ofapplying algorithms that processed data and stitched together the final image, was quickly overshadowed by the supermassive indignation driven by misplaced moralism.

Katie Bouman, a young postdoctoral researcher who had spent some six years developing an algorithm to bring a composite of several reconstructions of the black hole, was herself a picture of absolute delight.

Her hands went over her mouth, as the image of the black hole flashed on her computer screen. In a single tweet by US university MIT of a photo that captured her excitement, and media reports that followed soon after, she became the face of the moment.

And as lazy narratives go, so came the tweets of girl power and feminism and glass ceilings all shattering at the click of a re-tweet. Politicians also very casually helped to add millions of tweets to that narrative.

Then came the breezy backlash. The self-appointed vigilantes of the Internet mocked her accomplishment in building the algorithm, wrongly attributing most of the code behind the image composition work to Dr Bouman's colleague, Andrew Chael.

Fake memes went viral, and doctored Twitter accounts of Dr Bouman spawned. Evidently, trolls no longer live under the bridge.

The outrage came even as Dr Bouman had not claimed credit for the black hole image. "No one algorithm or person made this image," she wrote on Facebook. "It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat."

She was made the face of gender diversity among scientists, and then, on the opposing end, bore the full brunt of a "sexist vendetta", as her colleague, Mr Chael, put it.

"If you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life," he tweeted.

The irony that right-wing trolls were using an openly gay astronomer to front an attempt at preserving the status quo of a dominant class did not escape him either.

This online meltdown tells of the lazy judgment of the social-media herd. There is cheap vanity to peddle, cheap jokes and insults to tell, and cheap lines to draw across ideologies.

And when we don't pay in dollars for the social media outbursts, we find it harder to count the cost, and easier to absolve ourselves from responsibility.

What is one tweet in a sea of millions, except for being one of the million tweets hurling right at a single, actual person. As her few seconds of fame escalated and took an ugly turn, Dr Bouman had to switch off her phone, by then a rapidly ticking metronome swinging to the beat of online vitriol.

And so, the better lesson of social platforms comes from bubble tea.

Specifically, of drinking bubble tea on behalf of others for a fee. Earlier this month, a large number of Taobao users popped up to offer to film themselves eating fried food or drinking bubble tea on behalf of those who are trying to lose weight.

This allowed their "customers" to consume the videos without having to put on the actual pounds, for a service fee of two to 10 yuan.

"Don't worry about getting fat, diabetes, high cholesterol, high pressure - I will take all the risks for you!" said one listing cited in a South China Morning Post (SCMP) report.

But in just about two weeks, the trend appeared to be fading. When SCMP tried hiring sellers to drink a cup of bubble tea, it only found a few of such listings available. One seller contacted by SCMP admitted that his listing was up there mainly for laughs. (He did, however, honour the transaction with a photo of him drinking a cup of classic milk tea.)

Yet, it seems better to get behind this sort of hype, precisely because it is silly and temporal.

Rather than unleashing a meltdown showing upideological faultlines and bad manners, the bubble tea surrogate trend just fed on the banal potential of the Internet. It is merely a bit of chump change for vicarious living that already persists on social media platforms.

Google Trends showed that the reveal of the black hole image spurred a huge number in searches on galaxies, NASA, and science as a career. (Yes, Lord of the Rings too.) The Internet is still a rich fact-finding source for those driven by thoughtful curiosity.

So where we should draw a distinction is the actions on social platforms sitting on the Internet. There, it's Narcissist manifesting in digital form. Being honest about that allows us to the bear it for the shrillness it represents.

Or in 140 characters, better bubble tea by proxy, than bigotry on the fly.