Has Social Media Made Us Arrogant?

I joined Facebook in November 2008, a little later than many people my age, but seeing it as no more than a chance to share pictures and thoughts with a few friends. In January 2009 I was suddenly put on redundancy notice (along with some of those friends) and it became a vital part of communicating and feeling supported by my friends. I do not have much of a local network of friends and so being able to communicate with a wide group of them from across the country all at once has been very valuable for me. I always argue with those who like to claim that social media has been a damaging influence on people. On a personal level, I am not sure how I would have coped with events in my life since 2008 without it (probably the way I did before 2008 – badly).

I will admit that my attitude to Social Media changed during the London Olympics of 2012. I had been working in the voluntary sector in the run-up to the Games and I saw how funding had been plundered by the government to support the Games while the top brass and companies favoured by the International Olympic Committee were allowed to swan around tax free. There used to be a website where you could download an invoice to send to George Osborne saying thank you for the Games, can we have the money you took back now?

I wrote a list of twenty criticisms of the London Olympics, while sitting on a train heading for the south coast of England. I thought that it was largely uncontroversial and I still do think that to this day. I am happy to acknowledge that the Games did very well for the reputation of volunteers, the visibility of women’s sport was notable and that the Olympic site appears to have been developed with a little more thought than many other Olympic venues around the world. However, I think that my criticisms stand and there is a country of closed leisure facilities which suggests that the ‘legacy’ was not as permanent as some people claimed it would be. What I had never imagined was the reaction to this post.

A long-standing friend of mine attacked me as ‘dull’ and I started to get messages that went beyond having a friendly disagreement and personally criticised me for speaking out. Four years on this seems mundane (though I have had a death threat since then so maybe I have recallibrated the scale of abuse). We seem to have accepted a world where speaking out about anything online leads to abuse. The friend who first attacked me no longer speaks to me and has blocked me on Facebook. This is an immense shame as we used to get on very well. I did send him a letter earlier this year with an update on life and to find out how he was. He let it be known through a mutual friend that he was grateful ... he let it be known through a friend? Yes, I know, he ought to join social media and get connected.

After the Olympics, I did steer away from politics a little. I suppose that I thought that you were all interested in bilingual puns and jokes about cheese rather than my political opinions. However, I did make the occasional post, if only because political views are part of who I am. I do not share stories or make blogs because I am looking for a discussion, only because I am interested in sharing things that matter to me. However, some people seem to think that if you put political opinions on your private Facebook page then you are somehow ‘asking for it’ – a point I made to my former friend in 2012 but one he ignored because he wanted to repeat his view of how wrong I was.

It was after May 2015 that I really started to write about politics more. A friend of mine had asked me why someone with political knowledge and interest like me did not reflect that in their social media presence and I agreed that I had been too quiet. I am not saying that I have all the answers or indeed that my philosophy is anything near coherent (after all, I use soya milk to make a sauce that goes over bacon) but to understand who I am, you need to know a little of what I believe.

The funny thing is that it is only politics that causes trouble. I post about being a Quaker all the time and no-one takes issue with my religious beliefs. I make occasional reference to my ideas on how to work with teenagers and that is rarely questioned (though a friend did once tell me off for seeming to give him parenting advice by writing ‘why would I take advice from you?’. I held back from replying, ‘because you have experience of one child, I have experience of thousands of them’).

However, I have a slight dread of posting anything political because it seems to create two misapprehensions – firstly, that I am interested in debating any topic with whoever cares to take issue with me and secondly that the world is no longer about trying to persuade someone that you are right.

This second point is worth dwelling on for a moment because it is part of what has undermined our politics in this country so badly. We seem to have moved from a world where people discuss points for mutual elucidation to a world where people stake out their ‘tribe’ and attack anyone who is not of their tribe. No-one seems to want to welcome others to their tribe. This is across the political spectrum too – from the Tories with their tedious rhetoric about ‘liberal left-wing undermining of the country’ to the Labour Party selling those ‘Never Kissed a Tory’ t-shirts. I have kissed a Tory voter. She gave me tonsillitis. It seems that the ideology is not so much ‘toxic’ as infectious.

This development in how we engage or rather disengage with people who disagree with us is important because it changes the nature of politics. When you are looking to persuade other people to agree with you, then it focuses you on argument and making a good case for what you believe. When you focus on what is wrong with the other person then you focus on attacking their own integrity and behaviour rather than discussing their beliefs. No-one ever changed their mind because someone walked up to them in the street and started shouting at them. This is not what this kind of politics is about though. Why bother persuading people when you can simply state your superiority through repeating your views even louder?

The other point is about why people feel the need to argue. Let me put it this way. I know people whose political views are at odds with mine. For example, as a pacifist, I know some people whose love of the armed forces I most definitely do not share. What do I do when I see them post something that I disagree with? Nothing. What would be the point? I may have spoken to them before but there is little point repeating our very different opinions. Besides, it is their facebook profile, why should they not post what they believe, however wrong I think it is?

I am yet to meet anyone who I agree with a hundred percent about everything. However, I do know some people whose views I am interested in and usually I will ask them about them rather than have them decide that I need to know about them because I am clearly so wrong. There is something about Facebook in particular that makes some people think that they have been given an open invitation to tell you why you are wrong.

At this point, I do have to ask if gender plays a role in this. The overwhelming number of my examples are about men and I do wonder if this is significant. One of the best real life examples was Tim the Tool. I remember sitting next to him on a night out and him asking me what I thought of tarot cards. I said that I did not believe in them and he started to tell me why I was wrong. I said okay, but it was not something that I was not particularly interested in. He told me again why I was wrong. I kept quiet the next time he stopped and when I failed to respond to his question, ‘you don’t believe me, do you?’, off he went again. A colleague of mine (young and female – there is significance in this) once said that she thought that he was a bully. I would think that that was going too far, but I do think that sometimes he came across as thinking that his views were always more important than anyone else’s and that he had an open invitation to talk about them whenever he chose. He is a lovely, decent man but he needs to realise that not everyone is interested.

This brings me to Facebook, where you would think that the definition should be ‘you are among Friends’. On Friday I saw quite a few things that I felt like sharing. Among them was a tweet from Hope Not Hate pointing out that UKIP MEP Stephen Woolfe was enjoying the benefits of the UK’s EU membership while in hospital in Strasbourg. It seemed an uncontroversial point to me, rather like wondering how the Daily Mail manages to run its campaigns against ‘rip-off exchange rates’ or the idea that you will soon need a visa to visit Benidorm. It is not deep political philosophy, it is more a light-hearted jab (to use a metaphor for violence rather than the actual violence used by UKIP MEPs (allegedly).

Soon I had received a message saying that my ‘argument needs to be better’. Actually, my ‘argument’ needs to be nothing and I do not ‘need’ to account to anyone for what I decide to share. This was all very patronising and I pointed this out. I did also say that this person was welcome to their opinions, but mine were different. Another message came back. This time a further attack on my views on UKIP, so I decided to respond by asking if the messager would answer me one fundamental question before I replied to their message – at what point had I given them any indication that I was interested in discussing this with them? Ping! Another message came back explaining to me why I was wrong about UKIP ... at which point I stopped. There is a point where for your own safety and sanity you just need to disengage, even if you would like to have the last word.

Has social media made us all arrogant about our beliefs, then? Are we losing the art of ignoring things that we do not agree with and replacing them with a constant need to be combative about everything? Is defending our ‘tribe’ so important that we have to personally attack anyone who is from another tribe?

I tend to think of social media as being one of those things that is neither good nor bad but which tends to amplify people’s instincts. For every lovely crazy friend who wants to help me with a new scheme, there will be a crazy message from someone who wants to tell me how wrong I am. They could have done this before (Stephen King likes to point out that he got death threats on paper before there was an internet for sending them) but I suppose that it is easier and more obvious now.

Perhaps we all need a starting point for engagement in politics on Facebook. I think that a handy guide would be –

1) Accept that other people have opinions that are not the same of yours (you should have learned that other people are not thinking the same thoughts as you around the age of two or three, but it is never too late to learn).

2) Accept that people sometimes express those views for their own amusement, entertainment and identity.

3) Just because someone has put their opinions on display, they are not necessarily interested in your critique of them.

4) If someone displays a disinterest in discussing something with you, shut up.

5) Your self-worth is not demeaned one bit by the existence of opinions contrary to yours.

6) If unsure, ask.

7) If someone has not been persuaded by your statement of your views, their understanding will not be increased by simply restating these views, possibly using CAPITALS.

8) Think about when you have changed your mind about something. Think about when someone has angrily told you how wrong you are. Draw a Venn Diagram. Notice anything?

I am not going to stop posting things or sharing things, but I do aspire to recieving a politer level of abusive message.