Time to switch off from Twitterverse

Social media is like the bubbling river of ectoplasm in Ghostbusters 2, feeding on hate and rage.

“Life is short. Spend it arguing about politics and religion with total strangers on Twitter.” I can’t remember where I read this recently but it struck a chord. Indeed, I reposted it this week on Facebook (oh, the irony) after reading of top journo and podcast guru Hedley Thomas’s spray at Twitter last month as a waste of time that’s distracting too many journalists from going out and digging for real stories.

It has been with increasing trepidation that I tiptoe into the Twitterverse’s torrent of bile as invariably one emerges feeling depressed, dirty and in need of a long, hot shower. It has begun to remind me of the bubbling river of ectoplasm in Ghostbusters 2, feeding on hate and rage, except that there’s no one to call when the latest pile-on begins, polarising people and nourishing the New Intolerance.

Case in point: the other day, during an election campaign getting towards its pointy end, Twitter was blowing up not about some finer point of policy but whether Mathias Cormann had been caught perving at Chloe Shorten in the audience during the first televised leaders’ debate. Despite it being obvious to anyone bothering to look at the footage properly that he was craning his neck to look at a TV monitor, it didn’t stop the predictable dogpile by the usual suspects: the Van Badhams and Van Worsehams, the career misandrists and those who bathe in male tears, and their eager armies of acolytes.

At its best, Twitter is a potent and unique tool that turns anyone with a device into Johnny-on-the-spot in a moment of crisis or breaking story. At its worst, it’s catnip for narcissists; an echo chamber for empty vessels intent on making the most noise, an amplifier for sound and fury, signifying nothing, the enemy of fact-checking, analysis and rational thought, and a source of lazy news for screen-locked scribes.

It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I embraced social media fairly early in the piece, diving into my second life on Facebook and spending far more time than was healthy on Instagram. I became obsessed with digital art and cobbled together a manifesto that the mobile phone had made us all artists and in the future we’d all be famous for 15 seconds. But slowly the creeping solipsism and feeds filled with selfies turned me away. Life is short — why spent it creating art for total strangers on Instagram? Et tu, YouTube, where amid the endless expanse of arrant nonsense an actual psycho’s murderous rampage replicated like a virus and 65 million people in 24 hours gawped at Taylor Swift’s latest hymn to herself.

There’s a growing school of thought that the social media experiment has been a terrible mistake, a genie that can’t be crammed back in its lamp. Alan Kohler pointed in these pages recently to a piece in The New Yorker magazine about Twitter founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey that noted: “Since the 2016 election, it has grown increasingly clear that allowing young, mostly male technologists to build largely unregulated, proprietary, international networks might have been a large-scale, high-stakes error in judgment.” As Kohler notes, the problem is the colossal scale and the sheer impossibility of checking everything before it goes out. The Dorseys and the Mark Zuckerbergs face dilemmas without precedent in human history while getting unfeasibly rich almost overnight.

Chris Mitchell, columnist and former editor-in-chief of this newspaper, suggests polarisation of debate about Christianity and Islam has only worsened in an age of thoughtless social media sloganeering. “How can one write or govern for all if there is no such thing as objective truth, just the truths of individuals and their disempowerment?” he asks.

Author Bret Easton Ellis recently articulated the modern condition: “A vague yet almost overwhelming and irrational annoyance started tearing through me up to a dozen times a day” prompted by “strangers on social media who offered up their rash opinions and judgments, their mindless preoccupations, always with an unwavering certitude that they were right. A toxic attitude seemed to drift off every post or comment or tweet.”

Have we created a dystopia from which we can’t disentangle ourselves? Must we froth like Pavlov’s dogs at each morsel of ragebait? Evidence the social media dream has soured is everywhere, from the roaming hordes of phone-toting zombies to the sad rude twits in restaurants gorging on perpetually connected emptiness.

When Bjork, high priestess of hip, issues a call to log off Facebook and go for a walk in the forest, perhaps it really is time to switch off, unplug and tune out.