REFLECTIONS ON THE TWITTERSPHERE

For my sins I have discovered Twitter. Of course I have been superficially aware of the thing for some time but never really saw the point. Then after a discussion with a friend in a café in Piccadilly I decided to give it another go. The net result, [no pun intended] being that I soon became addicted.
The appeal of Twitter is not hard to fathom, the potential to take part in a national and sometimes international conversation and to communicate with those whom, outside of virtual reality, you would have no possibility of conversing and - for the politically minded like myself - the chance to add your penny worth to the cut and thrust of political and cultural debate.
The atmosphere on Twitter is a strange combination of the intimate and private and public and open. The conversation runs on a spectrum from overly cutesy and saccharine to the virulent and abusive. In political discourse in particular licence is given to a level of rudeness unusual even in the normally acerbic dialogue of politics. This rudeness often descending into gutter abuse and the flagrantly ad hominem. It is this aspect of Twitter that most interests me.
Cutesy 
In the atomised and alienated world of the big cities social media has created the means of contact and interaction that is, at least superficially, democratic and open. At its best the cut and thrust on Twitter is democratic and open. Where else, for example, could I express my disdain for the current Foreign Secretary’s abject response to Israeli settlement policy on the West Bank, directly to the Foreign Secretary himself?
There is always however an undercurrent of anger in me, a feeling of my own real impotence. I can stab and thrust at the things I hate and despise but no real blood is ever drawn. So often I sit on the edge of civilised discourse.
The psychology of this discourse is obviously deeply linked with the strange combination of sitting in the comfort of your own surroundings, safe from any physical come backs, whilst engaged in acerbic exchanges with strangers. It also speaks of a deep anger running just below the surface amongst citizens who feel disenfranchised and voiceless. For many Twitter has become their voice.
At the very margins of this group are the socially inadequate, the mentally unwell and the sociopathic souls who in Twitter have found a means to enter the world from which they have been excluded. This is the world from which the Troll has emerged.
I speak of these things in awareness of echoes in my own psyche, indeed anyone who has ever shouted at a radio or television screen has glimpsed the anger and impotence of the Troll. 

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