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. On Christmas Eve, I sent a pious tweet asking God to protect the poor Jordanian pilot who had been taken hostage by ISIS. Did I actually care about him, or was I trying to show everyone that I did? If I had wanted to talk to God I could have just prayed. Even in writing this, I am succumbing to a form of narcissism (lots of what my old editor called the ‘vertical pronoun’ in this copy). All journalists who write opinions flirt or fall into pomposity and preachiness. But when it is just a few columnists, you can bear them. It’s their job. Now everyone can publish all the time and the results, if you read them, are suffocating.
But freedom of speech should also include the right just to beg everyone to shut up for a moment. Better to turn off Twitter for a few hours. Look away from the screen and spare an unpublicised thought or two about those people who died today.
Comments