Watching Our Actions and Words in the Digital Age

In the past few days, I have been peripherally involved with three situations involving potential bad behavior. All three situations occurred in digital arenas. None of the three overtly said, “I am going to ____”, but each of them were phrases that indicated physical or emotional harm. And these weren’t kids cyberbullying. They were grown ups.

This is a tricky aspect of digital communication. I asked myself this morning how many times in the past month I’d jokingly said, “I’d just love to kill ___ because he _____….” While I know that I didn’t say the words with criminal intent, and that I meant them to be lighthearted and funny, how easily things could have been perceived differently had I written them online.

Words matter — they always do. And all too often I’m guilty of using them without thinking first. Perhaps it’s actually a benefit of the “digital age” that we are all needing to realize that how we communicate and what we say is important.

Frankly, my antenna is probably up on this stuff after having suffered through multiple viewings of the Ray Rice wife-punching video. That’s fodder for a whole blog post of its own. But today, when one of these situations arose, I asked myself if not addressing the situation was tantamount to knowing about abuse and not reporting it.

This morning, I had an interview with a reporter who is writing a story on Catholics and our use of and family teachings about social media. I couldn’t help but address to this writer my concerns that we parents need to be increasingly cognizant about teaching our children Internet safety, but also how to communicate ethically, positively and cautiously in all arenas, including in social media.

In the case of Elonis v. United States, the Supreme Court is deciding this issue:

Whether, consistent with the First Amendment and Virginia v. Black, conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant’s subjective intent to threaten, as required by the Ninth Circuit and the supreme courts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont; or whether it is enough to show that a “reasonable person” would regard the statement as threatening, as held by other federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort; and (2) whether, as a matter of statutory interpretation, conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant’s subjective intent to threaten.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Are you cautious in your “digital footprint” of communications? Have you ever seen a perceived threat online, or been the subject of one? What did you do?

Update: For more on the topic of Facebook, check out “A Facebook Manifesto” by my good (real life!) friend and fellow Catholic Patheos author Kathy Schiffer.