Fearing the rise of social media

Late last week, John Waters wrote a column in the Irish Times under the headline Internet is debasing our public discourse. Throughout the article, he bemoaned the slide of public discourse into an off the cuff, tirade-style interaction where people spoke first and thought later.
The starting point of his piece was the senseless abuse aimed at British Olympic diver Tom Daley on Twitter by a young man who has subsequently been arrested by police. The basis of Waters’ argument seems to be that giving people like this a voice is a great crime for which he holds the internet solely responsible.
A flaw in the argument lies in the agency with which John Waters chooses to imbue the internet. This vast and complex interconnected system of computer networks is not an active force in the world in and of itself. The people who use it, for whatever reason, are the only source of its power and influence.
I am aware that there are echoes of the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ argument in the last statement but given that even in the hands of a disturbed individual, the component parts of an internet-enabled device cannot be used to mow down innocent people I think this can be acknowledged and then left to one side.
It is the user-driven nature of the internet that has made it such a popular method of communication and led to it becoming such a massive part of many people’s lives as to be almost ubiquitous in such a short space of time. To blame the method people use to communicate for the way in which they choose to communicate is to miss the point entirely.
Among the other issues exercising the author are the removal of filters, checks and balances, which have traditionally governed the way people communicate. He pines for the days when it was only those in the privileged position of being journalists or opinion columnists that could have their message reach the masses.
Their work passed through the hands of an editorial team who checked it over thoroughly on a number of fronts.
I would argue that the amount of noise generated on the internet, along with the tendency for falsehoods to be posted, has led people to trust the reputable news outlets more than ever, be they local, national or international.
Ironically, it is the behaviour of certain sectors of the press that has led to a lessening of respect for the fourth estate in general.
In failing to recognise these aspects of the argument, Mr Waters has revealed what can only be described as a kind of snobbery in relation to the opinions of those who cannot fight their way into the mainstream media or who choose to work in other fields while retaining enough interest in the world to get involved with others online to discuss it.
In focussing on the person who attacked Daley, Waters has chosen to completely misrepresent internet users by ­suggesting that any more than a tiny minority are in any way similar. He will no doubt be aware of the old saying regarding empty ­vessels and their capacity for noise generation, so it should be no surprise that this is as true online as it is in the real world.
‘Internet fetishism’ and ‘internet fetishists’ are phrases used by Waters to describe those who would challenge his views on this topic. This phraseology betrays his contempt for those who he clearly regards as aggressive, intolerant and boorish. It is the snobbery implied by this attitude that is so disappointing. There is a sense reading his piece that everyone who uses Twitter is to be derided and people who feel the internet is anything other than a filthy playground of the uncouth and uneducated are somehow less intellectually accomplished than those who favour pen and paper and older forms of communication.  
Mr Waters is not the first to cry moral hazard in the face of technology he fears or does not wish to engage with. The author Will Self speaks about the long history of warnings about the dumbing down of culture as follows: “The suspicion that mass media led to a banal middlebrow culture is as old as the printing press, arguably even older given that Plato thought that writing itself was an intolerable derogation of the poetry of the spoken word.
However, from the vantage point of the wavecrest of each successive wave of popularisation, the anxieties of proceeding generations seem touchingly premature.”
Given that John Waters is a long-standing, well-respected columnist, I’m sure he will have received some fairly robust opinions through his letterbox over the years. Most people who write a column where they express strongly held opinions can expect those who hold the opposite view to challenge them occasionally. It is called a debate.
That some people have traditionally chosen to ignore the chance of discussion and opted instead to send abuse or threats is not something that came with the internet or Twitter.
What has increased is access. Anybody is now free to speak his or her mind under a newspaper article, via Twitter or on a forum. That some people misuse this opportunity is not the fault of the technology that facilitates it. To suggest that it is coarsening our public discourse seems to lack a basic logic. The people saying these things online will no doubt say the same and perhaps worse in private.
As with content of all kinds, the passive internet merely allows you an infrastructure to access what others create, say or think. The bravery that people feel when hiding behind aliases online doesn’t encourage them to have the feelings and thoughts they do, it only allows them to express them anonymously.
What is happening is that the discourse, which has gone on privately in the past, has become public and certainly in some cases it is very, very ugly. In most cases however, people’s discourse, both public and private, is valid, reasonable and worthwhile and this will only benefit from more contributors and opinions.