A 32963 island resident learned a hard lesson last week about the power and perils of social media, when a few minutes of videotaped hostility went viral, viewed by hundreds of thousands of people within a matter of days.
What happened on South Beach at Castaway Cove on Jan. 5 was not something of great significance or something any of us needed to know about.
But we do.
We know about it because one of the teenagers involved in the incident used his smartphone to record it.
We know about it because someone posted the teen’s video on Instagram where it has been viewed more than 630,000 times.
We know about it because two versions of that video – the 19-second post on Instagram and a four-minute account that surfaced later – have been circulating via text messages and emails throughout the Vero Beach community.
And there is little that Bill Becker, portrayed as the villain in the video, can do about it.
Three days after sharing his account of the incident, in fact, Becker clearly had backed off his initial response to the video and no longer was exploring legal remedies for what he believes was cyber-bullying.
“Ray, this thing is dead,” he wrote in a text message Sunday morning, when I made a follow-up inquiry for additional information about the Jan. 5 incident in which he angrily confronted two teenaged boys outside his Castaway Cove oceanfront home over a Christmas tree bonfire on the beach.
“Any more comments or actions empower cyber bullies,” he added. “You are being used by these bullies.”
Actually, the purpose of this column is to use this unfortunate incident to illustrate how vulnerable we’ve become in the age of social media, where our worst 19 seconds can be exposed and exploited – sometimes to embarrass someone as a means of retribution, most times for no other reason than low-brow, juvenile entertainment.
All too often, such videos have been edited down to eliminate any semblance of context and fairness, and to make the greatest impact possible on the social media sites to which they are posted.
If the laughs, outrage, views and/or comments they produce happen to come at someone’s expense? That, I’m told, is the world we now live in.
Any one of us can become a social-media star at any time. Do something stupid, be involved in an accident, lose your temper – and if you’re outside your home and someone nearby has a smartphone, there’s a real chance you’ll end up on the Internet.
It’s a lesson Becker learned after he uttered harsh profanities while scolding and berating two teens about the bonfire on the beach behind his home.
“I really don’t know much about social media,” Becker said last week, after the video generated a local buzz.
He knows more now.
If those 630,000 views were by separate individuals, a group of people greater than the entire population of Baltimore and nearly as large as the population of Las Vegas has seen – and in many cases commented on – Bill Becker at his worst.
In the Instagram video, Becker twice says to one of the boys to “shut your (expletive) mouth” and calls him a “smart (expletive),” telling the teens that embers from the bonfire in his “backyard” were blowing toward both the dunes and his house.
The boy responds, “Dude, I’m not even talking,” as the red flashing lights from an approaching Fire Rescue truck, which responded to Becker’s call, can be seen in the background.
The shortened version of the video ends before the Fire Rescue crew arrives and calms the scene.
All of that is included in the longer version of the video, which records Becker telling the firefighters that flames from the bonfire rose as high as 25 feet and the embers threatened his “$5 million house.”
In the extended version, the boys deny being snarky or rude, and they tell the firefighters that they were collecting Christmas trees and burning them. They repeatedly say they would have extinguished the fire if Becker had simply come down to the beach asked them to do so.
The boys, using “sir” to address the firefighters, also apologized for any trouble they caused. One of them can be heard saying the wind was blowing “toward the ocean,” away from Becker’s house.
There’s nothing in the video to support Becker’s claim that the teens were verbally abusive or disrespectful to him or anyone else. If anything, the boys appear to be well-mannered and respectful.
But Becker said this episode outside his home actually began 10 minutes before the video starts, adding that he endured as much of the teens’ “disrespectful, rude and condescending attitude towards me” as he could before his anger pushed him to profanity.
“Those words are not something somebody would say at the beginning of a conversation, so, for me to have said that, there had to be a significant period of time where I let them go off on me,” Becker said.
“People who know me,” he added, “know I use words like ‘sugar’ and ‘fudge,’ and that it’s unusual for me to use that kind of bad language.”
For the record: I know Becker. I’ve played tennis with him. On those occasions, he has always opted for ‘sugar’ and ‘fudge’ – not profanities – to express his frustrations.
That’s why I found it jarring to watch him spew those harsh profanities in the video and hear the venom in his voice as he verbally blasted the two teen boys.
But, again, I wasn’t there.
I know what Becker told me. I know what I saw on the video. I don’t know what happened before one of the boys pulled out his smartphone and began recording the incident.
I’m sure of this, though: That 19-second gotcha video was edited and posted on Instagram to publicly humiliate Becker and punish him for his outburst.
Yes, Becker was wrong to use profanity when scolding the boys – no matter how uncharacteristic his verbiage, no matter how angry he was at the time.
But the last words uttered on the four-minute version of the video were troubling, too.
“Hey, I’ve got the whole thing on video,” one of the boys boasts, as if he had done something to be proud of.
That might be the world we now live in, but it doesn’t make it right.
None of us is perfect. Even the best of us makes mistakes. We shouldn’t need to worry that someone with a phone will catch us at our worst and share it on social media.
But, as Bill Becker learned on the first Sunday in January, we do.
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