Dear SJ:
I’m loving #AskSJ and I’m concerned by this trend where people put statuses on WhatsApp talking about people be it friends or lovers when someone has a problem with them and yet they don’t say who exactly they are referring to. These days you see all sorts of annoying statuses. I want you to ask people “What would you do if there was no WhatsApp for you post about how someone did something wrong to you?” I don’t think WhatsApp is the platform for people to go on about you heard gossip about you or how you are fed up with your relationship. May you please help me with something profound on how people can do better in that regard?
– WhatsApp must fall.
Dear ‘WhatsApp must fall’
Readers, you heard the lady – she sent a voice note – What would you do if there was no WhatsApp for you to post about how someone did something wrong to you? Tweet us at @EnthuseMag.
I would love to say that the problem is WhatsApp. It’s not. It’s how people use it. I get this sort of problems about it all the time. Because of the ability to type and print words to masses, every person has become a publisher. With the tap of your hands, you can type a long message and be agenda-setting like a newspaper.
I call it The Numbing of a Society.
It’s something that I had to learn myself. You pick a few lines of a song, paste them on your social media and people put two-and-two together. Many times, people will post stuff from somewhere without acknowledging the source of the words. It’s a poor way of trying to be profound or as Ranga Mberi once referred to it as “fake deepness” on Twitter.
So you have people trying “fake deepness” in the hope that people will understand exactly what they are talking about. Communication has been very hard for humans because you end up rambling and ranting instead. You are absolutely right. WhatsApp or the rest of the social media apps are not the places to air one’s personal relationship problems. Celebrities are the worst these days because they have taught us that it’s all about the clap back. It then becomes about showing off one’s verbal diarrhea.
Many times, someone is genuinely aggrieved about their family, friends and relationship. Some people are good at addressing an issue there and there in person while some people are not. This means that someone will bottle it up and later spill it all over WhatsApp as a status or a burning hot profile picture with strong words. I am a do-as-I-do guy. Dump people like that. People with poor communication skills are the worst and that’s a sign of immaturity. If dumping them is not an option, then I go back to saying be direct about a problem and say it to the person/s you have a problem with.
Rather you make the person feel bad about what they did than you feeling bad about what they did. That’s how people learn.
The bottom line is that weird statuses and posts are an indication of someone’s bad manners.
In essence, it has nothing to do with technology. It about good old bad manners and we live in the Love & Hip-Hop generation where being dramatic is hot stuff. People have become deliberately dramatic more than ever!
What would people do without WhatsApp? They would be forced to communicate directly with the person they have a problem with. It starts with you. Don’t do the same thing. Hip-hop mogul Rev. Run says that “the best person to talk to about the problems in your relationship is the person you are in a relationship with. Often times you ask your friends and they haven’t got a clue of what’s really going on in your relationship and they’ll just make things more complicated.”
Sonny Jermain is an award-winning public health, maternal, sexual and reproductive health rights facilitator and a traditional psychic. This column appears Thursdays on Enthuse. Send questions to asksj@enthusemag.com or WhatsApp +263 77 274 8454. Follow @SonnyJermain.
