Geoff Clarke
Just read interesting book “Stop reading the News - a manifesto for a calmer happier and wiser life by Rolf Dobelli. Thought provoking and has made me determined to pay less attention to incessant news and social media
Sounds like excellent advice.
I was listening to the national TV news last evening and there was piece about the increasing number of NHS staff who have received threatening, abusive and downright appalling messages from crackpots, in regard to Covid. These seemed to be primarily posted and received on Twitter, often in response to the staff tweeting personal messages about their work and how they were fairing, or not. A consequence of this was that staff. understandably, were feeling 'depressed', seriously offended and even threatened, etc.Originally Posted by Also Ran
It did get me thinking though, about the practice of broadcasting something (anything) about yourself to the big wide world, which is clearly going to be inhabited mainly by people you don't know and who don't know you (except for what you tweet/share). Given we've some 8 billion people on the planet isn't it likely that you're going to be communicating to quite a few 'nutters' and downright 'evil' people, who just want to spread harm, especially when they've been granted the cloak of anonymity? And as we know, we (humans) tend to disproportionately pay-attention to 'bad' messages, especially about ourselves. Is is really credible that everyone in the world is going to love you?
I don't know what the answer is, but maybe as a society and as individuals we need to think seriously about this apparent psychological need to broadcast our personal views and personal feelings to literally everyone. not just to our friends, family and people we know.
I post this completely assured there are no nutters on this forum
Am Yisrael Chai
That is a good point raised there Mossdog.
I'll preface this with the statement that I do not in any way condone or approve of people sending abusive messages to anyone on any communication forum.
If you communicate with the "world", it is not just "crackpots" you should think about. I am fairly sure that if I broadcasted some of my thoughts/views to the world, there would be several perfectly sane and rational people who may respond robustly. It seems logical that as you move further away from scientific facts/principals or laws of nature, reasonable people may have reasonably different viewpoints, which they may hold more or less strongly. I choose not to use twitter etc because I don't think it would be good for me to engage in such conversations via that medium.
It is a conundrum of our times though. If someone does want to use twitter, it is not a reasonable response to say that they should stop using it to avoid abuse, if they get torrents of abuse when they do. After all if person x got lots of unwarranted abuse whenever they rode the bus, the correct response would be to deal with the abusers not tell x to stop riding the bus.
That is very well put. We have a lot to learn about this phenomenon. Being polite and minding your own business is not old fashioned but a hard won code of behaviour that we would do well to remember.
Very good points there and I agree wholehearted with most of what you say. But I think the analogy of a bus ride and the likes of Twitter doesn't quite hold up. We can 'catch' the bus ride abusers, but the cowards who post abuse on social media are not so easily tracked down and held to account. At least for the present, if you find the abuse too overwhelming, and you're unable to ignore it, it just seems to make good sense to avoid a broadcast to the world. I don't think that is satisfactory, but it's the best we have for the moment, I think.
Like you, I don't use Twitter either. But is there a setting (like on Facebook) where you can restrict the tweets you post so only certain people can read them and respond?
Am Yisrael Chai
I agree, and your point is what I meant by "a conundrum of our times".
I follow quite a few people on Twitter and I haven’t really seen, using mossdog’s example, front line health care workers getting upset by the covid denier, anti-vax, flat earth conspiracy theorists and the like having a pop at them. The more usual reaction is that they either ignore them completely, and let others take them on, or just block them. Twitter is a well anybody can shout into, which is a good thing, but blocking weirdos is always an option.
Twitter by the way is a far far better experience than Facebook, where you are more likely faced with unhinged relatives spouting bollocks and are far less likely to be able to find the actual opinion of experts
Last edited by Fellbeast; 04-02-2021 at 04:05 PM.
Depends what you use twitter/facebook for...
My brother is a journalist and swears by twitter.
I basically use facebook to keep a contact with friends/relatives, keep up to date with races/results/etc, and as a store for photos. Over 50% of my facebook friends are on "unfollow"... ie i am friends with them but i don't get their stuff come up in my feeds... that 50% generally consists of anyone who bombards it with political opinions or claptrap of any persuasion... i'm just not interested.
The adverts on facebook are the worst thing... i did a little survey of my newsfeed a couple of weeks back and i think around 40% of the stuff in there was adverts...
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