Friday, August 9, 2013

Warehouse of the damned

One of the people I follow on Twitter is a Brit, Ben Gunn; an articulate, outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform and non-violence.

(My readers know that when Bas Bleu calls someone “articulate”, that means he’s reached the higher echelons of those who have an actual idea, arrange their thoughts before writing, and express themselves well. I don’t toss that word around like beads from a Mardi Gras float. You can see what I mean at Gunn's blog.)

He’s also an ex-con who was released from prison not long ago after serving 32 years for the murder of a friend when he was 14. (I don’t understand the nicetiesif that be the right wordof the British justice system, but it seems as though he’s on some form of never-ending parole, and can be busted back to prison for any one of a number of infractions. That is, he’s always got a sword of Damocles hanging over him.) He’s not burdened with bitterness by his experience, which I find remarkable.

As I said, he’s outspoken, which puts him on the firing line for a lot of Twittercrap. And if you don’t know what I mean by that, well, let me just say that you don’t want to know. He invites it by asking questions and then debating whoever slews over to lambaste him. No death threats so far (that I know of), but I've seen at least one person publicly call on the prison service to haul his ass back to the slammer. 

He followed me a couple of months ago, after I replied to a retweet of his tweet, “I’m trying to think why stupidity shouldn’t be made a crime. All I can come up with is that there will never be enough cells…”

I was honest: “Uh, they’d certainly have to make room for me. Several times a day. #guilty” On account of, I can be as big a dimwit on occasion as the next guy.

Since then I’ve watched the firestorms Gunn provokes, although I’ve mostly stayed out of them. But the Twitter-dot-com is kind of like a British public school: it fosters shoot-from-the-hip opinions backed by a minimum of fact or ration and propelled by a turbo-charged and vehement viciousness. Well—start-ups are like that, too.

But I’m not here to talk about that. No, of course I’m not; it's Friday.

Yesterday he tweeted, “There are times when I wonder whether people have lost their intellect, moral conscious, or just their balls. #twitter”

And all of a sudden I got this image of a great cosmic “lost-&-found” social media warehouse, chockablock with all the decent human qualities people heave away in vast numbers when they get a Twitter handle or a Facebook page.

(Or, indeed, when they join any online forum. I was on a World War I discussion list back in the 90s and you would not believe the mud-slinging, character assassination and multi-syllabic versions of "get stuffed" that flew back and forth amongst the academic set.)

So, I envision stacks and stacks of tattered civility, discarded moral compasses, dysfunctional synapses, disused intellectual rigor, lost gonads and the like. All waiting hopefully to be claimed by their owners, or auctioned off to someone who’ll appreciate and use them; but all the while knowing there’s small likelihood of that.

Sadly, there’s obviously another building full of massive egos, blaring voices and atrocious spelling, writhing with activity, metaphorical elbows flying; everyone trying to shout above the din of all the other inmates. It’s like a 24x7 rugby game—muddy, bloody and painful—without a goal.

See, the term “social” media is really a misnomer, and now whenever I sit back gobsmacked by some new piece of stultifyingly grotesque inanity or mean-spiritedness on one of the platforms, I’ll just see another addition being made to that warehouse.

And another. And another…


We're gonna need a bigger warehouse.

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