We're all just “shouting at tea”
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The best, and worst, thing to happen on Twitter in recent days is the ongoing saga over Yorkshire Tea. One innocent tweet by the Chancellor — who happens to be MP for Richmond, in Yorkshire — triggered a monumental pile on. All because he had the audacity to show him prepping for the budget with mammoth quantities of his local brew.
Twitter, collectively, appeared to lose the plot yet again. Over tea.
Whether it was aggressive left-wingers asking for an official response from Yorkshire Tea and promising a boycott of the brand, or those on the right promising to start drinking it, something just isn’t right.
It would be easy to make this a piece about how the left-wing are getting increasingly aggressive on social media after losing in December. But that would be to fundamentally ignore the bigger problem. Yes, social media is getting more bizarre, more polarised and more aggressive on an almost daily basis. That’s been true for years. But that’s only because it reflects the debate overall.
Naively I believed that the overwhelming election results a mere two months ago might encourage people to relax, get down off their virtual soapboxes and get back to real life. In the real world, people can agree, disagree and have a cuppa in peace. I even believed that the difference between pre-election Twitter hype and the actual election results might have helped people to reflect on whether they really were the voice of the people.
How wrong I was. We seem collectively to have moved from an election or Brexit footing to an all-out war footing. Every single move by the other side is scrutinised, criticised and publicly vilified on social media. People are being reported to their employers for daring to voice private opinions, in a public forum. Celebrities who have opinions that diverge from the industry norm are publicly denounced by trade bodies and the Twitterati. One actor was recently driven off social media for fear of losing his career.
At no point, as far as I can work out, has anyone on Twitter ever taken a step back to work out if they actually change anyone’s minds. The social media celebrities of left and right, continue to preach to their own choirs in some contrived attack against their opposition — it seems as if the idea of persuasion has vanished. A mindless shouting into the void in the hope of provoking reaction has replaced the concept of debate. The objective seems to win popularity among members of your own tribe rather than reaching out to the wider world.
The idea of engaging with this seems almost impossible, since any disagreement results in being labelled either a fascist/idiot/communist depending on who you disagree with.
So from now on I think we need to take our lead from the social media masterminds at Yorkshire Tea.
Next time someone starts screaming into the void, let them. Of course asking people to look after themselves and be kind to others is a wonderful message.
But what we really need to do is remind them, just as the Yorkshire Tea Twitter account did, that “Sue, you’re shouting at tea”. As a metaphor for what most of us are doing on Twitter every day, it’s pretty hard to beat.
