International Law

Mark Pesce has written an excellent piece for ABC's The Drum calling for some Twitter calm:

Between Catherine Deveny, Miranda Devine, and now Helen Razer, Twitter has suddenly become the bete noire of the Internet. Judging from the feigned shock from the public, the horror and outrage from the tabloid set, and the deleted tweets in nearly everyone's timeline, I'd suggest people are taking things a bit too seriously - and a bit too far.

I think Mark does a good job of putting individual tweets into their proper context:

Twitter has always had a certain inane quality. Like a frighteningly sophisticated cocktail party filled to the brim with neurotics, everyone struggles to hide themselves by brining forth their inner Dorothy Parker, searching for that perfectly pithy bon mot, one that will be appreciated and retweeted. That is Twitter's internal monologe. It's not meant to go wide, not really meant to live beyond the context of the moment of its utterance, and certainly doesn't mean anything. It's not mean, it's not bullying (mostly), and it's not to be taken seriously. People say outrageous things every single minute - it's one of the things we're very good at. To take any one of these things and promote it as the Death of Civilised Culture is, well, ridiculous.

Do you reckon this is going to slow down, or even stop, if all of the Helen Razers of the world unplug from Twitter? I'm afraid not. We are, each in our own special ways, getting more and more into one another's faces, thrusting our lips next to one another's ears. The social media amplifier that is Twitter means that even our quietest whispers now come across as screams. There is no silence, there is no privacy, and there is no longer room for outrage.

Finally Mark ends with a plea for forgiveness:

Forgive Catherine for her comments about Bindi. Forget that Miranda made some inappropriate suggestions about rodents and body canals. Invite Helen back into the deep end of the swimming pool. Sure, you can drown out here - but most likely you'll only catch a lungful of water. There's plenty of other people to keep an eye on you. They might make fun of you as you splutter, but they'll also swim to the rescue if you seem in real trouble. And that's the point. Twitter is all of us, at our best and at our worst. You can't just look away. This is who we are.

Read the whole piece here.