Use social media for impact and not 15 minutes of fame

In the age of social media, so much time is spent telling the world about what you’re doing, where you’re holidaying, where you’re eating, and on Twitter especially, that witty one-liner you share for group endorsement, writes Joyce Fegan

We all have moments that have stuck with us, and will stick with us, forever. Why those moments? That’s the interesting part, it usually reveals what matters most.

Mine was on a hot, sticky day in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was a Saturday morning in November 2014. I was sitting in a small room listening to a then 89-year-old woman speak. She was tall, very tall, her height at her age made her seem dangerously fragile. She spoke quietly, but firmly, in a strong Australian accent.

By the time she had finished speaking, rendering a room of Irish aid workers, journalists, diplomats, and President Michael D Higgins mute, I found myself with large, fat tears rolling down my face. I couldn’t seem to make them stop. I was asked if everything was all right.

Extremely embarrassed, I failed to explain myself. I didn’t know what it was that this woman, Catherine Hamlin, had said to cause such an effect.

I do now.

For nearly 60 years, this Australian obstetrician and gynaecologist has accepted and treated the poorest of the poor of Ethiopian women and girls, who have been injured in labour or childbirth. Girls as young as 13, would be left outside the gates of her hospital in Addis Ababa, as lepers, wearing urine-soaked clothes, abandoned by their families. If you could only see them now.

There is a medical condition known as an obstetric fistula, where a hole develops in the birth canal and it can result in incontinence of urine or faeces. It is caused by poor access to medical care, malnutrition, and teenage pregnancy. It is almost non-existent in the developed world. It is a disease of extreme poverty.

It is estimated that Dr Hamlin has successfully treated appropriately 55,000 women in her time; 55,000 human beings better of because of one pair of hands. She will be 94 next month, and still working.

But it is not only about the medical treatment, some of these patients have been trained up as nurses and doctors, and still work at her hospital in Addis Ababa today. Where some could not, or would not, return to their families in rural Ethiopia, jobs were found for them elsewhere.

In 1958, Catherine and her husband Reg answered an ad in The Lancet medical journal, placed by the Ethiopian government, looking for an obstetrician and gynaecologist to start a midwifery school in Addis Ababa. In 1959, they arrived with their six-year-old son Richard, with a plan to stay for three years. As you can guess, they never left.

This week a video of a new housing development in Kansas City went viral. It showed 13 “tiny homes” built for homeless veterans. A group of locals got together and called themselves the Veteran Community Project with the aim of tackling veteran homelessness head on. They went straight to their city council and said: “We want to do this crazy thing and we’re going to be dead in the water without your support.”

Each home cost $15,000 to build, all that money came from donations. There are another 37 on the way. As the veterans walked into their new home, they were greeted with such things as a hamper of food, with a little tag that said: “From your local Starbucks.” The entire community got

behind the initiative, tired of a problem, homelessness, they felt they couldn’t do anything about.

This is about a city standing up and saying: ‘We’re not going to wait for somebody else to fix this problem, we’re going to fix it ourselves’,” said co-founder of the project Bryan Meyer.

Since the video went viral, 500 other US cities want to follow suit, and next in line to build these homes is Nashville, Tennessee.

In the age of social media, so much time is spent telling the world about what you’re doing, where you’re holidaying, where you’re eating, and on Twitter especially, that witty one-liner you share for group endorsement.

An article was written by NUIG researcher Mary McGill recently, for RTÉ’s Brainstorm, titled ‘We’re all

celebrities now’. In it, she details how smartphones and wifi have collided to afford anyone who wants it, the opportunity to be a celebrity.

“Anyone with a social media account will be familiar with the self-management that goes into everyday practices like taking and posting a selfie or a status update,” she wrote.

Depending on the context — and the audience — these pursuits can take up a lot of our psychological and emotional energy, as can monitoring the response our posts get or don’t get.

See that word there — energy, that’s the key. We only get so much time here. Do we want to spend that energy and that time, impressing people or having an impact?

Humans are a social species, so inclusion in, and acceptance into a fold or a tribe are fundamental to our well-being. Social media plays into that important need.

Not that we are all going to go off and qualify as obstetricians and fly to Ethiopia or go and build homes for the homeless, but it begs the question — could our time be better spent, pursuing impact instead of 15 minutes of fame? And it is not about being altruistic saviours of others, but community engagement, even if it’s with your local Tidy Towns group or an amateur boxing club, has been shown to help with wellbeing no end.

Back to the hospital by the river in Ethiopia, at 93 years of age, Dr Hamlin is not that well-known. She only had one child, a son, but there are 55,000 women who claim to be her daughter.

Not that we are all going to have that level of impact, nor want to, but it’s an important question to ask in the age of social media and instant fame: “Do I want to be known or do I want be happy?”

The two aren’t necessarily the same thing.