The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity; THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER by Douglas Murray

Author:Douglas Murray [Murray, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, censorship, Commentary & Opinion, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism, Social Science, popular culture, philosophy, social, General, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781472959942
Google: tPyaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-09-17T23:53:38.968263+00:00

Interlude

On Forgiveness

The arrival of the age of social media has done things we have still barely begun to understand and presented problems with which we have hardly started to grapple. The collapse of the barrier between private and public language is one. But bigger even than that (though partly resulting from it) is the deepest problem of all: that we have allowed ourselves no mechanisms for getting out of the situation technology has landed us in. It appears able to cause catastrophes but not to heal them, to wound but not to remedy. Consider the phenomenon now known as ‘public shaming’.

In February 2018, only a few months before Sarah Jeong’s appointment to The New York Times editorial board, the paper had announced another recruitment, that of a 44-year-old tech journalist called Quinn Norton. The internet immediately went to work, and – as they later would with Sarah Jeong – analysed her Twitter feed. Again they found tweets which were, in the language of social justice campaigners, ‘not good’. Among the things that were found were a number of tweets from 2013 in which Norton had used the word ‘fag’. As in ‘Look, fag’ and (on one occasion with another Twitter user with whom she was rowing) ‘you shit eating, hypersensitive little crybaby fag’.1 On another occasion – back in 2009 – Norton was found to have used the most unacceptable word of all. In 2009, in a row with another Twitter user, she had replied, ‘If God had meant a nigger to talk to our schoolchildren, He would have would have [sic] made him president. Oh, but wait . . . Um.’2 Just seven hours after The New York Times had announced its new hire it backpedalled by saying Norton would not in fact be joining the paper.

In a subsequent piece in The Atlantic Norton explained what she thought had happened. She acknowledged that many things she had written and tweeted in the past had been ignorant and embarrassing. She also explained what it felt like to, in her words, have a ‘doppelganger’ version of herself swiftly emerge online. In common with other people who had been the subject of online shaming this version of her that people were railing against was not ‘who she was’ but a hideous, simplified, out-of-context version of tiny parts of herself.

She explained that she believed herself to have been the victim of what she referred to as ‘context collapse’. This is another term for the collapse of the divide between private and public language, where a conversation meant for an in-group becomes known to an out-group with no knowledge of the original context of the discussion. Norton said that her use of the ‘n’ word had been in the context of an online row in which she was ‘in support of [President] Obama’. Since Norton had been in friendly as well as unfriendly rows with various white racists it was possible that she was using vile language to mirror back at someone who was also using vile language.

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