I’m not one of those purists who shun Twitter. I often find it depressingly vacuous – but hey, I’m a journalist and a tart. So I tweet. From now on, though, I’ll avoid it in the hours following a terrorist attack. Facebook, too.
Just look at what is now flooding the Internet, following the attack in Paris today. There is a tsunami of emoting and hashtaging about solidarity, free speech, not giving into intimidation. Everybody is saying that we must respond to this event, as if somehow it were up to them. Everybody reaches for the grand ringing truism — ‘Fear is the ally of the bully. #dontgivein’. That sort of thing .
There is something unseemly about this mass urge to express ourselves so in the immediate aftermath of a public murder. It’s like being at a wake in which everybody is noisily competing to say how much more they cared about the deceased.
I can’t talk.
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