Can you imagine what it’s like living in Corbynland? There can’t be enough hours in the day to discuss Israel and Palestine and Jews and Zionism. Daytime meetings. Evening meetings. Meetings about anything – the Left love meetings – that turn into meetings about Israel and Palestine. Everyone you know is talking about it. Everyone is responding to it. Lines are drawn. Where do you stand in relation to it? And when that happens, it’s easy to lose perspective.
I had a bit of re-think after that last post. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t believe that Billy Bragg actually was antisemitic. I know which side of the fence he’s on, that he’s a proper Corbynite and I know he said all that stuff about Jews “having work to do”, but still it didn’t really make sense. A man steeped in Woody Guthrie, why would he turn into a racist?
It made me think about the world he lives in and how you can get immersed into a world, how you can get consumed by it. And when that happens, people like Billy can say things like Billy said.
And it made me think about the world I live in, and in particular the social media world I live in. We all know words like “bubble” and phrases like “echo chamber” and we’re all aware that stuff. But still.
I’m still a Facebook-head. I know most other people have migrated to Instagram, but I still prefer a bit of a rabbit to pictures showing what I had for dinner last night. Facebook’s an odd place these days, it’s like a bar that most people have left and it’s just now just a few old blokes moaning. But that’s fine. I’m an old bloke and I like moaning.
So in Facebookland, I’ve got 1,481 friends but I only ever hear from about 10 people and now they’re the most familiar names in my world. They’re mostly people I’ve never met. Friends who I chat with most days, but I wouldn’t know them if I sat next to them on the train as it apologises its way up the track.
Every day I tune into these people and read their threads, see what they’re thinking, let their thoughts seep into mine. Who are these people? What are they doing in my world? And how did they come to be in my world?
Mostly my friends comments are forthright, their opinions strong, their views rigid. And mostly they’re angry. Or if not angry, then upset. They – all the people called David and all the people who read the Davids – write a lot, make a lot of comments about politics and life, about what’s right and what’s not. They’re all very pro-Israel and anti-Corbyn. And that’s fine by me because I’m very pro-Israel and anti-Corbyn and in the land of algorithmic opinion, this is where I’ve landed.
I’m fine with that, and even if does seem that Facebook is a diminishing world and now people prefer a world where the most political it gets is if you post an Instagram picture of your main course from an oblique angle. Actually, I can’t blame them for that. Politics these days is a fairly miserable place.
But what it means is that in my social media world, everyone is talking about Corbyn and antisemitism and (last week) Billy Bragg and (the week before) Margaret Hodge and no one is talking about food or where they went for dinner last night. And if everyone you know is talking about X, it’s easy to think that everyone else is talking about this stuff, that everyone cares about this stuff. Truth is, they’re probably not and they probably don’t.
If I was living in my social media world, I’d probably say something like “Exactly. That’s what Corbyn is counting on. He knows no one really cares about Jews and because there’s not enough of us to make an electoral difference he can do what he likes. So he’ll keep offering new Bank Holidays for things like not winning the World Cup and everyone will think he’s marvellous”.
If I was living in everyone else’s social media world, I’d probably be more interested in this
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Postscript: I was reading this morning and one of the Davids had had a Twitter-chat with Billy Bragg the upshot of which was
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Good for Billy. People don’t often apologise and he did and hats off to him for that. Still don’t like his music.