And Then Twitter Hurt My Feelings
Another contender for our series of classic Guardian sentences, in this case a subheading:
Until social media manners catch up with the real world, some of us will have to delete the [Twitter] app just to feel safe.
Just to feel safe. From Twitter. Which, we’re told, is “only happening on your phone” and “where no one is actually touching you and you are not in a corporeal sense under threat,” but where being laughed at or called names is “an incredibly visceral experience” for grown men and women.
By way of damning illustration, we’re steered to the sorrows of the actress and writer Lena Dunham, 28, who has “gone dark” on Twitter and is currently “trying to create a safer space” for herself, “emotionally.” Oddly, no mention is made of Ms Dunham’s own attention-seeking pronouncements and outright fabrications, including a false claim of rape involving an identifiable man, and which attracted much of the attention she now finds so unflattering. Guardian readers are thereby left to suppose that the consequent mockery and vitriol, and threats of legal action, were some inexplicable ex nihilo phenomenon.
The author of said piece is Ms Brigid Delaney, a novelist and Guardian features editor whose estimation of her own brilliance and entitlement to taxpayer subsidy entertained us not too long ago.
“Accidental kissing is sexual assault.”
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20829/
It’s very much a problem – routine hyperbole,
Siiiiiiiggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh.
David.
I have told you one hundred million times.
Never exaggerate!!!!!
Lights off… Lights on…
She must have the Clapper.
Evidently, Twitter death threats are OK if the cause is just:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/live-oldham-athletic-deal-sign-8405041
It’s very much a problem – routine hyperbole, often by self-styled activists, and the consequent blunting of quite important words.
And casually blurring the two as if they were interchangeable is … well, sly.
It is.
That is to say, it is indeed both incredibly sly and a problem, and it is having real world consequences.
‘Man spreading’ for example seems incredibly trivial, but actually I think it signals a very worrying trend.
That such absolute nonsense as ‘man spreading’ – and I don’t mean any old quotidian stupidity but real, pure grade ‘A’ need-to-wear-dark-glasses-in-case-it-blinds-you hardcore moronity – has made the leap from a radical Feminist blog in Sweden to Twitter and from there into material reality in the form of a campaign on New York’s underground system is enough to make my head spin.
If they can effect real changes in protocols, even in a small way as this campaign, fuelled only by Tweets then the outlook for 2015 does not look good.
As you suggest, I hate the sly way in which radically unrelated events are stitched together into a huge patchwork banner of bullshit on which is displayed in massive letters LOOK YE ON MY MIGHTY SUFFERING AND OPPRESSION AND BE AWED BY MY VICTIM STATUS*.
The most spectacularly stupid and/or dishonest example of this I saw was here in Rebecca Solnit’s review of 2014 in which she managed to conflate the kidnap of schoolgirls by Islamist Fascist outlaws in Nigeria with the relationship woes of a millionaire American football player, Eliot Rodger and Emma Sulkowicz as if these were all part and parcel of the same thing.
Except perhaps for the aptly named Sulkowicz, these are tragic and quite serious cases she’s describing but what they are decidedly *not* is part of a transnational interconnected web of ideas and attitudes towards women (i.e. capitalist patriarchal oppression).
Ironically, when there *is* actually an example of murderers who very likely know absolutely nothing about one another and have never met but who nevertheless share pretty much exactly the same view and understanding of the world – such as the two Michaels, Adebolajo and Adebolajo, the Tsarnaev brothers and the Kouachi brothers – that’s more often and not when any kind of connection is hotly denied (unless it’s a connection to Western imperial aggression, obviously) and when you are most likely to find yourself charged with being a racist bigot for suggesting there might be one.
Bullshit is irritating enough as it is, let alone when it actually starts to shape society in real ways.
* Under which should be written … er and then, y’know guv’mint, spare a subvention of enormous proportions for a poor waif wot such as I is.
the sly way in which radically unrelated events are stitched together into a huge patchwork banner of bullshit
Well, Delaney’s article is a bit woolly and it’s not always clear what her point is, or which quotes relate to whom; but the effect is to conflate the serious and the trivial as if they were to be disapproved of equally. As if the seriousness of one thing validated stern measures (or deep feeling) against something fairly humdrum.
But any mass medium that allows instant and anonymous feedback will inevitably attract lots of bilious knuckleheads. Controversy-seeking celebrities should therefore not be surprised by the sometimes unflattering contents of their Twitter timeline, especially in the immediate wake of their latest controversy. That attention-seekers can’t dictate the kind of attention they receive isn’t exactly news.
Maybe Ms Delaney could instead have wrung a 900-word article from the unremarkable idea that one shouldn’t tweet death threats, even empty ones – an activity that is presumably still rather niche. But implying that everyone should always be nice and polite on Twitter to spare the feelings of the ostentatiously delicate seems a bit like saying, “People really shouldn’t leave inane comments under YouTube videos.”