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I often think of social media in the “long form.” For example, the stories that caused Europeans to burn cell towers, or the villagers in India to kill strangers, including a government man who had been sent to tell them not to kill, or, in America, causing a man to take a rifle into a restaurant that had no basement, after he and many others had been told that there was a basement pedophile ring in there that Hilary Clinton was a part of.
I sometimes forget that social media also includes “short forms” such as twitter. I have written in October, Barbarians at the Campus Gate, about a professor in Sussex being falsely labeled transphobic, with no chance to face her accusers. Blame twitter.
As noted on the BBC site, (link) this week she said during a Women’s Hour interview:
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In the interview aired on Wednesday, Prof Stock said: “In almost every university… there are a small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sorts of things I say and instead of getting involved in arguing with me using reason, evidence – the traditional university methods – they tell their students in lectures that I pose a harm to trans students.
“They go on Twitter to say that I’m a bigot so thus creating an atmosphere in which students become much more extreme and much more empowered to do what they did, I guess.”
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The above BBC article contains this paragraph below, which reminds me of faculty trying to break the rice bowl of Canadian professor Jordan Peterson:
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The “tipping point” that led to her resignation, she said, was when the Sussex branch of the University and College Union (UCU) released a statement which “basically backed the protesters and implicitly made it obvious that they thought I was transphobic and accused Sussex University of institutional transphobia.”
UNQUOTE
My concern today is not the transphobia aspect, which I have written about in the last month, but the twitter aspect. Why do people who believe in the goodness of the Bible and the clear truth of science also believe in the pond scum who forward social media?
This week a pretty person of colour from my home town, trying to make it as a published writer, has harsh words for twitter. (Link) (I’ve edited in some commas and semi-colons)
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… apologies on Twitter are like Sarlacc pits and daytime naps you think will make you feel better but instead make you feel like you’ve been run over by a truck. They are traps. Never in the history of Twitter have I ever seen an apology be accepted or actually reduce the abuse levelled. One hundred percent of the time, they are dissected for inadequacy and insincerity, held up as proof of the offender’s malicious intent all along, and used as kindling to further fan the flames….
Then I remembered that not more than two weeks ago, I’d seen another femme-presenting author of colour who accidentally stepped into a race debate on Twitter, with an ill-timed and ill-worded tweet, provide a full and guilty apology; offer to make reparations; only to fall under a storm of exponentially worse and increasingly racist abuse until they deleted their Twitter account.
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The writer, Fonda Lee, points out that the twitter crowd never apologizes when they are wrong about, or have misinterpreted, an innocent individual. Well. I’m so contemptuous I could just spit: Pond scum! Poor Lee is expected by her publisher to be on twitter, unfortunately, as part of her marketing as an author. All I can say is, “Thank God I’m a nobody.” That and, “Don’t ask me to publicly serve my country.”
From the footnotes to Paul Graham’s essay on Earnestness: (Graham is talking about nerds like me and my writer friends)
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[1] It’s interesting how many different ways there are not to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.
Another thing I notice about this list is that it sounds like a list of the ways people behave on Twitter. Whatever else social media is, it’s a vivid catalogue of ways not to be earnest.
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In a world where the anti-vaxers refuse to believe the Russians have troll farms, I daydream of making a T-shirt: Social Media Kills.
…
…
Sean Crawford
In the fourth largest city in Canada,
November 5,
2021
Blog note: When I claim the two stories above happened “this week” that is not me playing “news reporter.” (as in new) I don’t patronize readers that way, although I do realize some of my countrymen fall asleep if something is not “up to the microsecond news.”
For my part, I have cultivated an attention span that reaches into time and space past the latest minute. In fact, I can be as interested in the Ides of March, over in Rome, as in November’s Italian parliamentary debates.
Aside to grammar police: I would be a poor science fiction reader if I couldn’t anthropomorphize November as being able to posses a debate. Like a castle possessing a wall, “the castle’s wall.” Not the wall of the castle. Or “the rocket ship’s red glare.” (photons bursting mid-air)
