A few months ago, Zubair and I entered a lift on the sixth floor of a building in Bombay. Another person entered the lift with us. He looked at Zubair and said, “Zubair from Alt News? I do not like you.” Then he looked at me and asked, “Pratik from Alt News?” He followed it up with, “I do not like you too.”
Over the next six floors, as the lift went down to the ground floor, we tried to engage with him. He said that he did not like the kind of work we do. But something else happened during that short journey. By the time we reached the ground floor, he was sweating profusely.
What had just played out was a behaviour that has become common in the online world, where people react sharply and aggressively to others. This time, it was performed with real people, in real life. And what this person experienced was a bodily reaction to what he had just done. In close proximity to real people, he had acted in a way he was used to acting on social media. It caused him to break into a sweat. What the person had experienced was social cost of being aggressive.
Social cost should be the fundamental feature in all social media applications.