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
niceties—if that be the right word—of 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…
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