Why people always pray on the social media when disasters happen?

These two pictures all have orderly format:#PrayFor someplace.
As the social media become a part of human’s life, we gradually have a new praying way:add a praying hashtag before our tweets to express we are caring about this disaster or we are praying for this.When some new disasters happen, people just changed the place in the hashtag.I think the original idea of these pictures is to show that the world is not peace and everyone needs to cherish their valuable life.But I want to talk about another point of these two pictures.Why people pray on the social media when disasters happen?

The disaster I chose was Tianjin explosion. Because I was in China at that time, I paid close attention to it.I want to recurrence what happened to me at that day:I woke up and grabbed my phone.I opened my Weibo and clicked the “hot topics” button.I saw theTianjin explosion news right away.And then I prepared my breakfast, when I sliced up the orange, I said to myself, Lynn, be careful.Getting hurt will be painful.And I cut a orange for almost ten minutes.When I was having my breakfast, my friends talked in group chat about that explosion.I felt panic.Danger was so closed to me.

I swallowed the orange and thought: humans are so unassisted.

The news brought me a sense of lucky and humble.But these were actually from our first instinct.We did put ourselves in victims’ shoes, but in this position, no one was willing to think about “ If that is me or my family my friends suffer from the disaster…”.We will shake our heads and say ‘bah” to drive this terrible thought away.

I think most of us cannot find the happiness from Facebook or other social media.But we find the evidences of happiness from the inornate horrors: we are alive.This is the best thing in the world.We should live well.

At the critical moment, people definitely cannot post selfies.However what should we say?

Praying hands emoji is cheap sympathy.However as a citizen, do we have the capacity or obligation to verify?But if you post something as usual, you will be said cold-blooded;If you are moved by the firefighters, someone will say that you transferred the focus.If you promote " fireman occupation” on the Weibo, you will be said you are Monday morning quarterback.For those marketing, this is a harder problem.Are they still post the advertisements and talking about red wines or clothes?Or if they talk about explosion, I bet someone must say that this is marketing tool.Does this mean that only the victims and firefighters can say something?

So what can I, a ordinary citizen, say? I can only say “It scares me”, like an uneducated old-woman.And when I saw this news on the Weibo, I can only repost them, and add the hashtag#PrayFor someplace.I believe the majority of people on the Weibo are sincerely praying for those victims. We see such a tragedy, the feelings are real.

The human nature trends to be kind.

And hereto, my idea overlaps with the idea which the pictures want to show.People pray, because they found that they are still alive.Social media do not give people happiness, but when you find you still have something that others do not have, you will gain happiness.As for, why they pray on the social media, it is just a platform.