By Mary Beth West, APR
Coming off the long Independence Day weekend, it’s appropriate that the Freedom Forum launched its “1 for All” campaign this month to spotlight our First Amendment freedoms.
As cited in Editor & Publisher in referencing the need for the campaign, “Only 4% of Americans can name all the ‘five freedoms’ guaranteed in the Amendment, and the other 96% don’t appear embarrassed by their ignorance.”
Even if they aren’t up on their civic lessons about the First Amendment’s direct role to ensure our freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition, everyone participating in the U.S.-based blogosphere and social media realm should count those blessings with tremendous gratitude and pride.
This month, “In the Profession” will focus on social media, with some observations on how the light-speed evolution of online communications tools, tactics and strategies are advancing public relations programs – all the while wreaking more than their fair share of havoc.
It’s that dichotomy of outcomes that makes social media such a parallel representation of the First Amendment itself.
Like social media, the doors that these freedoms open can let wondrous light shine in, but they can also unleash many ideas, opinions, sentiments and messages that are troubling, controversial, offensive, inaccurate, and, for lack of more to-the-point phrasing, can make for a big damn mess that people like me working in the public relations profession must ride herd on daily to clear up and clean up. Such is our lot in life, but truthfully, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
As an American, I learned long ago that the exercise of First Amendment freedoms doesn’t come wrapped in some neat little contained package or encased within a D.C. museum under Plexiglas in a climate-controlled environment.
To the contrary, our First Amendment freedoms’ strength, power and beauty are typified by the fact that they run amok all over the landscape, oftentimes making colossal, inconvenient spectacles that require us to have to stop, listen, consider, reconsider, and discuss with one another – even to the point of passionate wars of words – points of view that are not our own.
Sometimes, the net result of those freedoms even goes so far as to change how we do things, both as individuals and as a society. And we can argue yet some more as to whether those changes are good or bad. The circle of First Amendment freedom therein continues.
Quite similarly, social media operates and produces outcomes in much the same way, only in faster and more dramatic fashion . . . a veritable freedom-of-speech on acid. However unbridled, chaotic and maddening it can be, social media extends powers to the people that the Founding Fathers undoubtedly would have reveled in and embraced as a legacy to the Constitution’s spirit and intent.
To that point, I think those visionary forbearers would have insisted that social media and online communications exist as an unregulated, unfettered platform for our society’s advancement – both domestically and globally. And they would have credited us with enough intelligence to utilize it in such a way that the First Amendment would not only continue to survive, but thrive.
So to that end, let’s exercise those freedoms, and that intelligence, in such a way that would make them proud.
