THE OFFENCE OF EASY SOLIDARITY

PARIS AND SOCIAL MEDIA SOLIDARITY


When natural, or manmade disaster, or terrorist atrocity strikes the reverberations are immediately felt on social media. We live in an age when our immediate shock, horror, anger, despair and depression can be immediately communicated to hundreds, even thousands of friends and strangers alike. Without pausing to reflect or consider raw emotion pours out onto Twitter timelines and Facebook pages. I have reacted in this way myself. Merely tweeting ‘bastards,’ providing some small outlet, a little therapeutic relief perhaps. Then as the initial reaction passes the desire to show support and solidarity becomes the pre-eminent emotion. Of course some will rush to the scene to help, give blood, and comfort the bereaved and injured. These however will always be a minority, most people caught up in the business of living, meeting the demands made by work, children and loved ones. So in the age of social media they chose to add a flag or symbol to their Twitter Avatar, to wear a Je-Suis Charlie badge, or pin on a French Tricolour. It’s easy, requires no real effort, and possibly even serves to make you feel better as much as to demonstrate solidarity. But it was always thus. How difficult is it to put on a black armband, to pin on a poppy, to observe a minute’s silence? This was what people did and do because that is what people are able to do. In the past nobody thought to mock these gestures as ‘sheep like’ or ridiculed the amount of effort involved. Not so in the world of Twitter.

There is very much that is ugly in social media, sexism, racism, anti-Moslem bigotry and anti-Semitism all infect the medium. Gestures of solidarity represent a light amongst the darkness. However the politically correct police, purveyors of victimhood, the guilt soaked, and the ‘everything is our fault,’ brigade are never far away these days, now joined by the smug, ‘look how stupid the masses are’ crowd, often as much from the left as from the right. The easy display of solidarity has offended them and they have set about ridiculing and shaming those who seek to demonstrate their solidarity in this way. “Why,” they ask “do you show grief for this event but not others,” for whataboutary abounds. Then there is the sneering tone, the explanation to the ignorant masses that Facebook and Twitter are just big corporations exploiting tragedy. Or the accusation that you are simply parading your decency, making a statement about yourself, engaged in an act of egotism.  With the bodies in Paris barely cold they trumpet their own superiority over the lumpen masses.


The age we live in is not significantly crueller or more barbaric than it has been before, in many ways it is more civilised and less cruel. However what terrible barbarism that does exist is presented to us 24/7 on rolling news channels and of course on social media. Along with this development has come the holier than thou brigade, the PC police and the arbiters of what is acceptable and ‘cool.’  They are small people, another price we seem to have to pay for our greater interconnectedness. 

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