Social Media Petri Dish at 32,000 Feet

"Welcome aboard.  My name is Stacey, I'm your flight attendant tonight, and I'm going to be pointing out the emergency exits on this CRJ200 aircraft.  And if I decide to pull the escape slide and jump out of the plane, I'm not going to settle for two beers.  I'm taking the whole liquor cart with me!"

Okay, THAT statement got me to put down my newspaper and pay attention to the safety demo.  I decided that I liked Stacey, and I was going to give her my "undivided attention for the next few minutes."  Apparently many of my fellow passengers aboard this 40 passenger regional jet heading back to San Francisco last night liked Stacey too, because she ended up getting our undivided attention for not only the next few minutes, but for most of the flight.

Turns out that Stacey, like many of the rest of us, have been intrigued by the ongoing bizarre/intriguing/pathetic/uplifting/(fill in your choice of adjective here) saga of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater.  For the three people on the planet who have NOT heard about Mr. Slater, he is the flight attendant who allegedly was assaulted by an unruly passenger on JetBlue flight 1052 at New York's John F. Kennedy airport last week.  In an act of "working man heroism"/insanity/drunkenness/liberation/"Oh no, she didn't!"/(fill in your choice of adjective here), Mr. Slater responded by grabbing the aircraft intercom, uttering a string of profanities which can best be summarized in PG-13 paraphasing as, "I don't think that I want to be on this plane any longer, so I am going to have one for the road and head on home, thank you very much," took two beers out of the airplane galley, popped the emergency exit, inflated the escape slide, tossed his carry-on bags onto the tarmac (did he REALLY think that he was going to EVER need that spare flight attendant uniform again?  But I digress), jumped onto the slide, and went home, where the police found him intoxicated and in bed with his boyfriend a few hours later.  Talk about a day of multi-tasking.

But back to Stacey and our impromptu "Is Mr. Slater an Everyman Hero or Psychotic Loon?" town hall discussion group at 32,000 feet.  Stacey's opening salvo during her safety demonstration was an early indication of where she stood (and I have to agree with her on that one.  I mean, BEER?!?!  If you're gonna go down the emergency chute, at least bring a couple of bottles of champagne or a nice cosmo. Come on, Slater.  You're giving the rest of us gay style mavens a bad name here. But I digress).   Stacey told us that she had been reading a lot of her fellow flight attendants' tweets  and blogs, and there was almost unanimous support for Slater in that universe.  I checked out Sara Keagle's blog (www.theflyingpinto.com) which is featured on www.wallstreetjournal.com, and Stacey's pretty much correct.  But Stacey herself isn't so sure.  As she pointed out, there has yet to be ONE person who has been able to identify the alleged "unruly passenger", while there have been many people who have commented about Mr. Slater's own unruly and bizarre behavior during the flight.  For the next two hours, the first few rows of our little regional jet debated the pros and cons of Mr. Slater's actions - Were they justified? Would you have done the same thing?  Who do you believe to figure out what really happened?

For me, what was amazing about this discussion was not that it was happening, but the sources from which people were drawing to make their cases.  "The tweets that I've been following..." "One of the passengers posted a REAL account of what happened on Facebook..." "The Huffington Post says..."  Social Media has become the battleground on which Mr. Slater's actions will be analyzed and adjudicated.  What really happened on Flight 1052 - and who did what to whom - will be collectively decided by tweets, posts, and blogs. 

Do people really care that much about The Mystery of Flight 1052?  To answer that, just look at a few Facebook statistics on Mr. Slater:  The "Steven Slater" fan page has more than 200,000 fans, while the "Free Steven Slater" page has more than 35,000 fans.  One post on the fan page asked if anyone else had ever considered quitting their job in an equally demonstrative fashion - and got about 1,300 comments.  My favorite is the comment that suggested that White Castle, the hamburger chain known for their mini-burgers called "Sliders," rename those little nuggets "Slaters."

For my fellow passengers last night, their assessment of Mr. Slater highlighted the dangers of Facebook posts which can be interpreted in many different ways.  "He talked a lot about being in recovery and dealing with substance use." "He must have been drunk to do that." "Sounds to me like he was high." Seems that telling the world about your struggles with drugs and alcohol might not be a great thing for a future legal case if you end up in international media sliding down an emergency chute with a beer in each hand. 

As Stacey readied the cabin for landing at SFO last night, our merry band of travelers appeared to come to the universal conclusion that we weren't ready to join the Steven Slater fan club after all - the consensus was that, whatever the motivation, his actions were inappropriate and potentially dangerous to those around him. 

Perhaps one of my fellow passengers should make a posting to that effect on JetBlue's Facebook fan page.  It is bigger than all of the Slater pages combined, but doesn't have a single mention of Flight 1052 anywhere.  Check it out.  www.facebook.com/jetblue.