The Rape of Twitter.

Back in 5,000 BC the inventor of soft clay tablets for pressing hieroglyphics in with a stick was not lambasted for providing a medium by which the pharaoh could be threatened with rape. Likewise the inventor of papyrus and ink. Johannes Gutenberg was not criticised for mechanising the process of printing. The purveyors of picture postcards were not censured for what people chose to write on them, nor the Royal Mail for sending them or the postman for delivering them. There has long been a recognition that the delivery means is quite separate to what is delivered, and since the inception of language there’s always been forms of redress if you don’t like what’s been said. Twitter and other social media delivery systems are now though increasingly seen as responsible for controlling the content of what they deliver. It seems the increasing speed and breadth of distribution of the ephemeral world of language and anonymity is leaving only the messenger accountable. I’m left wondering if after thousands of years of creating and using language we are getting bored with it and turning our attention to the means by which it is transmitted. Is the medium finally becoming the message? Are we becoming increasingly transfixed by social media whilst at the same time impervious to its falling consequentiality? I have an image of a vastly reduced persona incessantly reading the same phrase, “How are you?” over and over again. Are we welcoming in dementia as a form of social interconnectedness? If you need proof read letters pre 1950. They’re not ‘quaint’ they’re thoughtfully created meaningful language. Maybe Twitter should not be condemned for delivering rape messages but for provoking us to rape our own language. 

Snowden Leaks.

Monday 9am, the Home Service (R4 if you’re a modernist) ‘Internet privacy’: 9.45am ‘Urban Gardens.’ So Facebook and Vodaphone et al, which means every corporate, governmental and no doubt criminal body in cyberdom, knows my name, location, what I look like and my every mouse move, which being a mouse is very intrusive indeed. They will know I’m married to Mothermouse, I live here, love guitars and bikes and my mobile number, a nugget of personal data even I can’t remember. In fact there’s so much personal data out there about each one of us that some enterprising auntrapanaur will soon provide a site that will tell us where we’ve  left our car keys, phone, whether we actually do like Potatoes au Gratin or where we’ve tucked our birth certificate in a safe place, and even how to spell auntrapanaur. At this point I feel so exposed I wonder if I should apologise for all the murders. As it is all this information only allows advertisers the merest glimmer of hope that by cold calling, popups, numerous emails and targeted ads they’ll induce me to buy things I’ve either just bought or already decided I don’t want. Never have I received an intrusion that’s prompted me to think, “Mmm, never thought of owning a hippo but you know I think it would be nice for the kids to play with, I’ll buy one.” All this data mining is, like oil, free at the point of extraction and, like oil only big companies can extract it and sell it on to other big players. Individuals, mere lumps of coal in the process, have no say in the matter. The result is a heavily angled playing field with a handy funnel built around the goal. At the other end our noble banks and corporation like HSBC and Shell collude with corruption to pillage the third world via shell companies of their natural resources while their lumps of coal go hungry with apparent impunity. And then there’s urban gardens. Do you realise that days after digging your new pond or planting some Campanula carpatica every local bee, newt, frog and butterfly will know what you’ve been doing? Your cat knows, obviously, everything about you and your dog, when it’s not asleep, watches you like a hawk for signs of intention. Just don’t go out there you’ll feel naked! Which isn’t a bad idea in this weather. And No Screwfix! I do not want another cordless drill!!!!!

My Big Greek Holiday.

It’s my 70^th birthday and Mouthermouse it taking me to Greece for three weeks, one week in Corfu, one touring the mainland and the last in Parga our favourite place. Hours of planning and filling in on-line forms, but it was worth it. These blogs are the memory of it.

First morning Nassaki, it’s 7.30am. The sky is a white blue wash over the bay that appears a giant’s biscuit bite north of Corfu town. Mouthermouse’s aircon forms the industrial backing to the tunes of the swifts Top Gunning the sky their wings flapping bursts of gunfire between swooping aerobatic curves. And when it stops there’s still a mist of morning noise from lorried drinks moving towards their shelf space. The olive trees with their silver sheen bend like the misshapen years of a hundred lifetimes waiting for their next pepper black crop, their wood as hard and sinewy as God’s ancient muscle. The mountain flank behind me rises rock grey marbled with dark green shrub, sparrows fluttering like animated leaves between the trees. The sun, yet to strike its warmth on me, is already powering the white of the column not three feet away. I can feel the heat off it. I watch its light levered by celestial geometry inch its way towards my foot. I sense an all-encompassing equality, where the sun can move to my foot or my foot can move to meet it. The water of the bay, as flat and smooth as the sky, would, save for a sliver of darker land, meet it in brotherly harmony. And then as if circumstance insisted on breaking this exercise in sugary pros a church bell clanks the banalest of tunes on its two bells, ‘ding dong ding dong, ding ding dong dong’ and at 8.20 for some bizarre reason. There’s no accounting for the swoop of swallows. 

Sexual Harassment at 12.

Noam Chomski observed that our politician’s call for us to support our brave fighting boys somehow automatically moves the debate away from reason to agreeable fuzziness. We stop thinking about their role in the rights and wrongs of the conflict and see them as purveyors of warm sliced agreeable bread. It’s a trick as old as organised conflict itself. On our part it requires nothing more than sentiment. One’s moral, ethical and logical senses are bypassed by some cheap undelineated emotion. If one refuses the agreeable bread those caught in its cheap emotion say, “so you don’t support our boys?!” or “you’re saying they’re dieing for nothing, their lives are worthless!” On the plane yesterday a puffy pink shapeless foulmouthed slag abused her four-year-old son into a three hour tantrum. Two hundred passengers knew there could be no reasoning with her; we just had to sit and hear a child’s life being ruined by her shapeless emotions. Recently I’ve read several horror accounts of casual sexual abuse by boys in school from teachers powerless to do anything. Their tactics are a carbon copy of the above. ‘It’s all just a game, a bit of fun’ and who whoever is against fun must surely be a miserable narrow-minded hypocrite. And the girls if they allow it are slags or if they don’t they’re frigid bitches. The illogic of their thinking is impervious to change by this same trick of moving any debate away from ‘what are you doing in the rights and wrongs of the situation?’ It becomes a sort of cognitive immunisation against the processes of rational thought. It’s truly frightening to see the moral, ethical and logical disciplines built up over centuries so easily and quickly corroded by cheap cognitive trickery. And now Egypt is falling beneath the same spell with fifty deaths, probably the first of many more. Who next will fight for their right to not listen, to die for the right to not think?