The reason I am on social media

Jul 12, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – I have defied my imagination for almost two years about entering social media. I have no explanation why I don’t have a smart phone, do not use Facebook, do not participate in social media, etc. I guess humans will always be difficult to understand.

But over those two years, many persons have urged me to go on social media because it is the avenue to reach people in this day and age. Over those two years, I began to come around to the idea because I saw a changing political and social landscape in Guyana that was completely absent in the age in which my evolution expanded – the seventies.

This new horizon lacked one overriding characteristic that dominated the environment I operated in during the seventies and eighties. Guyana was a vibrant philosophical society in which humans were committed to understanding both the quintessential and essential role of preserving the fulcrums on which existence and its precious values rest on.

The past two years, since the March 2020 general elections, Guyana has gone in a direction that bears no resemblance to the terrain I operated on in the seventies and eighties. We are talking about the death of one kind of country and the birth of another. The contents of Guyana since 2020 have taken on differences in both form and substance from my time. Guyana 2020 is not the Guyana I knew when my social activism and academic perspectives were deepened in the seventies and eighties.

I see a deadly parallel between small Guyana and the great superpower USA. See my article of Thursday, January 20, 2022 titled, “Deadly parallel between Guyana and the US in 2022.” In that column, I quoted world famous journalist, Carl Bernstein who argued that the US is going through frightening times in which its democracy is facing its greatest threat. And it is not coming from an authoritarian government, which is quite democratic but from dangerous sections of American society.

What Bernstein has posited is an enormous departure in traditional and current political theory which argues that a dictatorial government eventually morphs into a fully grown totalitarian system. Political theory adumbrates the breakdown of society when central power becomes repressive.

I am now on social media because I see huge gaps in analytical articulations about what Guyana has become based on Bernstein’s innovative theorising. I hope to plug these large apertures because there is need for such knowledge to be transmitted. And it is an enormous amount of knowledge to put out.

So I have taken the advice of so many that there is an avenue there that could be used to reclaim a Guyanese society where conscience and humanity are quickly disappearing. The obvious question is; don’t I have a forum – my column? A newspaper that belongs to the mainstream media and the role of social media are different institutions.

A mainstream media has a management team that is too busy to be burdened with stupid people that want to threaten libel for any and all types of harmless but justified criticism. What has happened in my 34 years with the Catholic Standard, Stabroek News and Kaieteur News is that people will call and complain.

The editor will ask you to temper what you write or change your column. This is perfectly logical. They don’t want to upset the organisation or the person or risk a libel writ. Here now is just one personal example of the difference between the mainstream media and social media.

The most tempestuous argument I ever had with my editor, Adam Harris at Kaieteur News, was over an article I did on the Muneshwers business place. It was a confrontation in which the decibels had no limits. I had read a letter in the Stabroek News where some staff members explained that they had to bring their own toilet paper and hand-washing liquid.

In any country, given the status of the company, commentators would want to give their take on it. As I was leaving, Adam asked me to wait to discuss a complaint he received from the company. I refused because I think that was encroaching on my independence. The normal thing in any country is for the company to reply and clarify. I will always remember the incident because Aubrey Retemyer and Dr. Asquith Rose intervened.

On social media, I don’t have to justify my commentary to whoever calls. I can choose to speak to them or not. Once there is no libel or sordid grammar, I can repeat what I said the previous day. Leonard Gildarie and I have begun doing the Gildarie-Freddie Show on social media from last night. It airs Mon, Wed, Fri. I hope to continue my life-long work of seeking to change my country for the better.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)