Adam Mark Smith’s public shamed and social media.

The incident involving Adam Mark Smith at a Chick-Fil-A drive-through widely known through a video he posted on YouTube in 2012. In the video, Smith filmed himself obtaining a free water and expressing his disagreement with the drive-through attendant about Chick-Fil-A company’s donation to anti-gay group. He told the attendant to quit working for Chick-Fil-A because the company had “horrible value” and was considered as “hate-group”.

After the video was posted, he received an email from an unknown sender telling him that they used facial recognition technology to identify who he was, and they told him they would get him fired. When he came to the office, his office received so many calls and voicemails that were full of threats and even bomb threats. As a result, he lost his job on the same day and lost a million in stock option. He had so many condemnations from the social media community, disappointments from his friends and his family for what he had done and be a target of death threat with his children’s photos online. He could not believe that only a short video could ruin his wonderful life completely in a short period of time. He posted an apology video online later and days later the attendant forgave him. However, criticism from social media was continuing and did not calm down after his apology video. Some people accepted his apology while others continued to criticize him. The public’s reactions were quickly spread out and had long time backlash that almost forced him to suicide. Properly, the content is still on the Internet indefinitely, so it will take a long time for people to forget about his public shame. It took few years for Adam Mark Smith to recover from his public shaming to start over again and published his book “Million Dollar Cup of Water” in 2015. However, he still received many negative comments on his book on Amazon after those years.

There are many perspectives to look at Adam Mark Smith’s consequences. In my opinion, I think Adam Mark Smith should not receive such consequences for what he did. He has his right to express his thoughts for what he saw with another person and that is normal in daily life. His attitude was not bad while he talked to the attendant and the attendant should not take this conversation too personally. In a customer service position, the attendant will face many types of customers and this case is just one of a normal case happens every day. However, social media has made this case go too far, so the case was viewed from a different perspective and that made Adam Mark Smith apologize for what he did. Sadly, “we were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland” and “we’re creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves.” are said by Jon Ronson in “So, you’ve been publicly shamed” (page 266 and page 269) and I agreed with that. I wonder why people are using social media. Do they mean to use it to destroy other people’s lives? Do they know social media can force other people to kill themselves? And people are happy to destroy other people’s life so they can be happier? I believe people are not that bad, we can do foolish things in life such as drinking and driving, but we do not want to destroy other people’s lives for fun. Somehow social media is creating a new “world” for our humans to be lost in it. People keep wandering around in that “world” and people can not find the way out. I am sure people are lost in that “world” because if they know this social media is that kind of tool, why they do not utilize this social media to destroy other bad things in human society that they hate such as communism, dictatorship, modern human slave, etc. Its “world” makes us blind, so people can temporarily forget other issues around us. I believe that social media is destroying our future and even my child’s future because it is shaping us to adapt to live within the boundaries that it creates. That is so dangerous to realize that, and I believe this is not a “world” for human society. People should maintain love, guiding other people to find the purposes in life, contributing to make our better world and enjoying our short life. Adam Mark Smith case highlights that social media is kind of a weapon to attack people’s public shame and it really does a great job of destroying people’s professional life very quickly. Smith had unfair consequences and long-term backslash that he should not have received. As mentioned by Jon Ronson in “So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” that, “A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.” (page 79). Sadly, that is so true, and should we accept it in our life nowadays? I believe it is not too late for us to choose what tool we use and know social media is not good for us.

Adam Mark Smith’s case is our lesson to learn to make our life better, so we should not adapt to live within the boundaries that social media created for us to lead us to a direction that we are not human anymore. Hopefully people can change social media to use it for better purposes to rebuild our society on Internet fix the current issue to give the “characters” like Adam Mark Smith a second chance to rebuild his life from what social media’s damages, so they can contribute to our society better through using their case as educational purposes to teach our generation how to think and how to use the social media better than our generation.