Sometimes silence is the best social media policy

THE trouble with touch-typing in the 21st century is that we've all just got too damned good at it.

Once upon a time in the 1950s it was only aspirational young career women in the typing pool who knew how to whizz their fingers across the keyboard in a blaze of blurry efficiency.

Now with computers and other devices infiltrating our lives at work and at home, most of us can type faster than we can think.

And therein lies the problem, as Pebbles Hooper proved so distastefully this week when she suggested the death of a mother and her three children in Ashburton was "natural selection".

Ouch. Even though the story is a few days old now it still makes me cringe just thinking about it. If ever there was a WTF media moment, that was it.

The trouble is, there seem to be just so many of them these days.

Back in the good old days when journalists had to type up their copy then submit it to the rigours of sub-editing and pre-print proofing, there was time to engage the brain and reflect on words and their meaning before they took flight in the public domain.

If that failed, hopefully a few more highly paid brains further up the newspaper food chain would engage their brain for you and edit your copy.

Today writers and commentators with Twitter accounts can instantly express their opinions without any filter or hierarchy of proofing.

Compounding the problem is that experienced journalists who know how to write (and think before they do it) are often being replaced by public personalities who have few other qualifications than being on-trend.

Whilst I was outraged at Pebbles Hooper's tweet, the journalist in me was almost equally offended by her incorrect use of "your" instead of "you're".

When you're limited to 140 characters, it beggars belief that you'd waste one in such a flagrant display of ignorance.

If this is who is writing columns in our biggest metropolitan newspaper, I have never been more proud to be syndicated in the provinces.

The disappointing thing is that failure to engage the brain before making extremely bad tweeting choices isn't limited to fashionable "it" girls.

The internet is littered with "top 10 social media fails" that rope in some of the most influential political leaders and the biggest corporations on the planet. Seriously - google it.

The idiocy demonstrated by people we would normally consider highly intellectual will make you feel really, really smart by comparison.

What this shows is that all of us can make bad calls once in a while and broadcast them before we realise.

Which makes the solution to avoiding what can be a personally and professionally devastating mistake really quite easy; shut the heck up.

Will life really grind to a halt if you can't share your internal monologue with the world RIGHT NOW? Or even at all? Some might argue it would actually make the world a much more pleasant place.

It is a good thing that social media has enabled all of us to "have a voice" in some small way, and it has certainly been used to good effect to hold politicians and corporations to account and to share hope and support.

But when there's such a vast swathe of online voices that seem to be shooting from the hip, isn't there power in silence?