Smart social media

It takes less than half an hour to upload a photo album to Facebook. It only takes a few minutes to snap a selfie and share it on Instagram. It takes less than a minute to send a tweet on Twitter.

It only takes a couple seconds for the wrong person to see your post or for the post to be misconstrued.

Social media is instantaneous, and so are its consequences.

There are more than 1 billion users on Facebook, and 135,000 new users sign up for Twitter every day. This is no small audience.

Within this Web-based world, there are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes. Whether it’s a picture showing underage drinking or an overly emotional tweet, most of us have posted something we later regret. Things happen.

But we need to be aware that things happen.

When we associate with an employer or other group online, we have more responsibility and a greater loyalty to others rather than solely to ourselves.

Posts should be sensitive to policies and codes of conduct of the organizations with which we identify.

In a perfect world, sarcasm would be readable in a 140 character tweet, but when a self-identified university employee tweets about killing an administrator — mockingly or not — consequences will undoubtedly occur.

While these consequences can and have been debated, the issue is something we can all learn from.

If you write for reactions, you will eventually get one. To be insensitive to your audience is irresponsible. Censorship is too strong a word for what we are advocating. We only need to be aware.

In 1884, Francis McCaron was arrested for yelling “fire” in a crowded Harlem theater, causing a panic when there was no real danger.

No matter how many of McCaron’s friends and peers either knew he was joking or thought he was legitimately concerned, he was still taken into custody.

More than a century later, we live in a world where threats are real, where bombings, shootings, homicides and terrorism are all too common.

No matter how light-hearted or sarcastic a social media post is intended to be, it is unrealistic to think it could not be misunderstood.

Without infringing on freedom of speech, we can all be a little more careful in our social media activity.

If we aren’t, we must be prepared for the consequences.