Let this sink in

 See how it works yet? Let that sink in. I’ll wait. But you knew that, right? The social media shorthand for “Even though I know nothing about you, I’m confident I know far more than you know… about everything.” is getting tedious, amirite? But seriously, I was once told that if you are under thirty and hold a firm political opinion, that opinion is almost certainly not your own. The polarisation of politics lends itself to this thoughtless accepting of the ‘facts’ belonging to your side of the argument and rejecting all others.

The same laziness occurs with language; it is far easier to simply repeat what others have said than to craft original sentences of your own. We all do it. We do it with headlines, with jokes, with pithy phrases, no matter how ludicrous, to the extent that the dictionary people now contend that literally doesn’t have to mean literally… literally. And superlatives are flung around carelessly, rendering them worthless.

We inhabit a linguistic world of repeated and regurgitated slogans and soundbites, often deployed clumsily and inappropriately, and almost always without considering how it makes us look. It’s as if people now speak in the language of the Super Soaraway Sun’s headline gagsters. Footballers have been mangling the language for years, but some of their gaffes of previous decades now rank as deep philosophical commentary in comparison to what social media has done to our communication. Sick as a parrot. Literally gutted.

Add to that the effortless ability to believe contrary things, just so long as they sound like things we should believe in and you get the idiocracy that is the developed world. Daft ideas, illogical ideologies and plain stupid assertions go unchallenged because they are couched in the language of instaneity. Accept and move on; even better, add your own borrowed understanding – it’s the science, stupid – and pretend to yourself that ‘your’ opinion matters.

You can't both be right.

As a result of all this, threads on social media rapidly descend into simplistic garbage whereby everybody appears to know exactly what the other side is really thinking, and everybody appears to have a quick-fix solution to every problem. Thus it is apparently possible to fix the economy by both spending more while spending less, by contracting the state and by expanding the state, by limiting immigration and by throwing the borders wide open.

I can read Twitter, but I can’t engage with Twitter, which means that, no matter how much my urge to wade in with my two-penn’orth, I have to sit back and just watch the threads play out. And what an education that has proven to be. From the sidelines you really can see the inanity which both sides bring to any discussion. If only I could force myself to exercise such a taciturn position in face-to-face discussions I would seem the wisest man in the room. See how it works, yet?

PS: It seems I can no longer even read Twitter now. 🤷‍♂️