antisocialmedia behaviour order

I like pork pies.

You will guess this by my weight, or how the women at Preston’s market tend to move towards the piles of them after glancing me in the queue. When braving supermarkets I’m not the kind to scrawl a shopping list of any kind, preferring the word-association games of my skittish short-term memory and somesuch whims. Picking up a pork pie? Then you need cheese, for the blessed delight of a Ploughman’s Lunch. Logical enough, and if given enough time I could justify the five other unrelated items picked up between shelves.

“Like this, you might like the other,” works in that context, and other than people I bump into, nobody is inconvenienced by my wandering about. I’ve not inherited from either my mum or her mother reading out loud from a list, (“Right, Lenor!” holding a list in one hand and a fruit yoghurt multipack in the other), although the finger wagging at certain items is something recognisible from that side of the family. Ah, you naughty marmalade, where are you hiding? Oh there you are!

Anyway, “like this, you might like the other” makes perfect sense when shopping, or even drinking, say at a beer festival or the like. It’s commonly seen on websites as the equivalent of chocolate bars before the checkout. They’re rarely any more logical than my racing from frozen chips to fruit juice, (“People who bought David Bowie also bought Worcestershire Road Atlas 2013 FULLY UPDATED”), but they serve a purpose. Mostly for the benefit of the company, of course, though a purpose all the same.

Where it doesn’t quite make sense, and it’s growing ever more easily dismissed, is the latest regenerated format of associated posts on Facebook, generated by the increasingly bizarre/bored thought processes of the Zuckermoth. I appreciate that the best solution to “Something on Facebook is annoying me” is to switch the laptop off and go outside. If I sidestep that view for the purposes of this entry, the newest take on “suggestive” auto-posts on Facebook is to display arbitrary updates about a subject you like being made by a subject you don’t like. It’s not “if you like a Melton Mowbray, you’ll love this mild cheddar”, it’s suggesting that you’d love buying pastry mix.

This is because the “someone is posting about something” posts have tenuous associations with the subject you like. Or to put it another way, it’s acting like your gran at Christmas. “I knew you liked your music,” she’d say, “so I bought you this.” And with a fixed grin and appreciative peck on the cheek, you accepted the Bananarama Greatest Hits double-cassette with all the love with which it was bought. Facebook has been turning seven shades of bonkers recently anyway, but “someone is posting about something” really is the first clear signs that dear old grannie has just put the kettle in the fridge for the last time.

One example from this very morning is “DMARGENTINA.com is posting about Depeche Mode.” Now I like Depeche Mode, I wouldn’t have clicked the big “Like” button all those years ago if that wasn’t the case. But with all the will I can muster, there’s no like here for the good folk over at DMARGENTINA.com. The cuckoo-bananas thought processes didn’t consider how genuinely disconnected some of the associated posts could be; it’s the closest Facebook has yet gone to spamming itself. I’ve no time for adverts (see the big AdBlock symbol top-right), so why do I need a quick plug for a South American Depeche Mode fan club?

The phenomenon of timeline tag-alongs isn’t exclusive to FB; the unused, unloved ghost town that is Google+ drops “what’s hot” suggestions in the middle of the week old dusty posts in its timeline, which invariably features a long comments section inhabited entirely by the five SEO nerds who still use the site. Twitter has long since embraced sponsored and promoted trending topics. These are just one example for each, though, and rarely interrupt the user experience. There’s not much it can do to control “Want to be a PS4 tester #KONY2012” nonsense, but adding to all that noise itself is careless and clumsy.

Fiddling about with a service which most people are happy with will always cause consumers to look elsewhere. Businesses who use FB for good can as quickly leave as they joined, and with more suitable platforms growing in stature, there’s an ever decreasing number of reasons to justify hanging around whilst newsfeeds break under the weight of so many memes and scams. The company which constantly rebrands, relaunches and reinvents is a company in trouble. Social media has less loyalty factor than almost any other service to which people are attracted; it’s not as though FB has the same customer loyalty as boot polish or the BBC.

In the days of ye olde Internet, of MSN chat-rooms and Geocities and usenet groups, there was a sense that compartmentalising the Internet was a sensible and logical thing to do. In time, the walled gardens of AOL and the like were burned to the ground, as people chose to spread out across dozens of websites without feeling a loyalty to anything they’d joined or left behind. There’s no Twitter instruction manual; users continue to shape and re-shape how Twitter feels, sounds, behaves. Facebook has turned into the walled gardens of the Internet’s past, its grass a dirty sludge of additional extras and unwanted faff. Engaged, savvy users can and will abandon a ship, especially when there’s no financial loss to doing so.

Facebook won’t achieve its aim if people who currently “Like” something switch off because subjects they don’t like now appear on an hourly basis. That’s not “social”, never mind “social media”, that’s just being a nervous man at a party starting every sentence with a tenuous anecdote in a bid to boost confidence.

When I think about bunging together the constituent parts of a Ploughman’s, it’s not on the basis that a pizza could do just as well afterwards. Even if it’s a Dominos make-your-own with pineapple, salami and sausage and…..Oh drat, hang on…..

very angry internet

“The Internet does not create social outcasts,” started the line I first heard in the mid-1990s. “It collects  them.”

It’s been quite a week for reeling out the wise old sayings and maxims, from “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me” to “Never trust a moose to buy a round of drinks”. Or something. To dust off another tired old phrase – “he’s the kind of person who could have an argument in an empty room” – and there’s no more larger collection of empty rooms that the internet outside abandoned building projects in the greater Dublin area. As long as there’s been message-boards and chatrooms there’s been Internet users ready and willing to flame a debate in a flurry of pedantry, insults, defamation and ‘your mom’ jibes. You’re not likely to be more than three clicks of a mouse away from a choice Anglo-Saxon swear word or twelve, be it within the swamps of YouTube comment sections, newspaper story reaction threads or  Twitter.

It’s the microblogging tweeters which have attracted the most attention from the mainstream media this year, to the extent that it appears the BBC and Daily Mail consider themselves to have coined the word “troll”. With trolling becoming the issue of the day for the guardians of good taste and decency, misunderstanding of the realities of everyday Internet use will doubtlessly grow, and from there comes bad law and reactionary mistakes.

With millions of people reacting in real time to every event happening around the world, be it waiting at a bus stop or watching the men’s 100m final (spoiler alert, Americans, Usain Bolt wins), Twitter never stops displaying the thoughts of everyone and anyone within easy reach of a keyboard. It should be obvious to anyone that little corners of Twitter will therefore get testy and tetchy, especially when dealing with those parts of the real world which seems so far away and distant – namely politics and celebrity. People always feel a buzz of starlight and success in the presence of celebrity or power, which is why so many Twitter users rush to get a reply, re-tweet or just a mere mention from someone whose face appears in the newspapers every so often. The Press can examine this as much as they exploit – themselves trolling the search function for enough insults and criticisms to fill a page of orchestrated outrage.

As anyone who’s ever worked in an office will tell you, email and the Internet are considered “great levellers”, enabling people with a slight grievance to email the head of department or supervisors in real time about (and I’m using real examples from my own office life here), the choice of music on a CD player brought in for the Christmas period, the eating of paté at lunch, and requests to take time off for “boyfriend problems”. The consequence of this can be a lack of common sense to the point of sheer lunacy, seen sporadically in message-board rants, seen almost by the minute in foul mouthed, racist or generally violent tweets to celebrities, television presenters or the like. I can see both sides – if a celebrity joins Twitter they should expect both fans and foes, but how does the ‘leveller’ of the Internet justify specifically targeting a presenter for being, say, fat, or boring, or ugly, or too Asian, and how many idiots do we allow to act this way before acting ourselves?

Britain already has laws against malicious behaviour on-line, some of it going back decades to an age when the Internet was talked about without the definite article and nobody had ever considered it likely that the computer in the corner of the room would be used at 2am for watching repeats of QI on YouTube. There’s no real need for additional laws against trolling to be drafted, though it’s tempting to risk it just to see how legalese translates ‘trolling’ into parliamentary language. “Trolls” can encompass all manner of on-line behaviour, not just wishing Tom Daley would be drowned or calling a British Muslim television presenter pub-chant insults. I’m sure some people will gladly call those users who type “FIRST!” underneath newspaper articles “trolls” just to see them woken up at 5am by the finest members of Inspector Knacker’s Computer Corps. Additionally, it could be worth a quick call to the Malicious Computer Behaviour Advisory Group (see, I’m already guessing how parliament might have to transliterate these sorts of things) every time an American calls a Briton “douchebag” in the YouTube comments sections underneath sporting highlight clips.

The fact is – we don’t need additional laws curbing Internet use, Twitter behaviour or blog opinions. By focussing on Twitter, the media are in danger of allowing the rest of the Internet to fester all the more than it already is, and that’s the very definition of the law of unintended consequences. Stretch the net further and you’ll find 4chan (and we all know about that, don’t we), the Daily Mail (ditto, for the same reasons by and large) and Facebook’s campaigning groups division, for which there’s no moral outrage too trivial that can’t be turned into a mawkish flag of life changing importance. There’s no feasible way, short of closing the Internet completely, for every page and every comment to be policed, not least because so little can be easily captured or searched, and as I said before, the ‘great leveller’ of the Internet provokes the most enthused argumenter to waft around “freedom of speech” justification at every turn. Arresting a student for insulting an Olympic diver whilst approximately a hypergazillion people wish death by cancer on approximately an additional hypergazillion in YouTube comments sections seems a little like trophy hunting to me.

I’m not being fatalistic; the Internet can be polices, and despite being a fence-sitting free-speech loving treehugger I accept that some frameworks must be erected to catch the worst forms of insulting or violent behaviour. But from this must come reason and restraint – is it ‘malicious’ that some sites host videos of alleged shooting massacres in Iraq or Syria, shared by some people who campaign for justice in the Middle East and shared by others who just like watching gore and extreme violence? How much legalese do we want to slalom around the distinction between “genuine” and “fake” reasons for sharing around violent videos of this kind? If we learned anything from the ‘Twitter joke trail’, the written word can be redefined howsoever an unintended audience member wishes. Will there be a legal definition drafted for sarcasm, irony, insult? What becomes of a joke when a barrister-turned-MP decides to analyse the definition for the purposes of statute law? If you watch a video in which a Libyan market trader is shot in the neck, do you watch it for pleasure, curiosity or research? What about porn?

The Internet can be a very angry place. You’re never too far away from people ‘swearing down’ that another person, or an institution, or an entire country, is going to feel his/her/their wrath. If we allow the current breed of Twitter trolls to lead the redefinition of on-line behaviour, we could end up with restrictions far beyond any feared by SOPA campaigners. I’m more angered that my mobile phone provider demands I ‘opt in’ to material it considers to be adult, and that this appears to have been largely accepted, than I am bothered by knowing that a celebrity television presenter is being called an ugly slut on Twitter. He/she/they can probably deal with that in their own way, or just stop using Twitter. There’s little chance of fighting back against censorship or state control if there’s restricted access to the very tools to carry out the job. Let’s treat all trolls as we would most permanently angry. I’d rather have an Internet with a few old man’s pubs occupied by barflies and world weary know-it-alls than one with minimal furnished see-and-be-seen bars where you walk around with fixed smiles and bitten tongues.