Social media has come a long way in recent years.
Remember the time you’d receive, through the post, a quaint little invitation, hand-written on rose-bordered notepaper bought from the ‘three for two’ bucket in WH Smith.? It would request the pleasure of your company at a friend’s fondue party, organised as an excuse to show off the new eighteen inch, colour television set. 
Oh dear God! The sheer terror! Your mind would immediately click into excuse mode, but you were fresh out of dead grannies and if the kids were sick any more, you’d be reported to the Children’s Panel.
Nowadays though, it’s possible to ‘virtually’ attend such a party from the comfort of your own armchair. No longer need you fret over being polite to the host when they ask you to comment on their newly wood-chip and emulsion decorated home.
Of no concern either, is that irritating know-it-all who’s experienced everything you have, only longer, better or in the case of ill health, worse.
And, while the host is able to give you a flavour of the party as they Face-Time you around selected guests, what they are entirely unable to do, is pressure you into sampling the culinary non-delights of salmon and cucumber on a rye crispbread.
Of course, social media messages are prone to hacking from time to time – something that was unlikely in the days when communication was principally done by lighting a bonfire on top of a prominent hill.
“Look yonder! A third, bonfire has been lit. This can only mean bad news.”
“You’re damned right. That’s no bonfire – that’s your house. You’ve been hacked.”
But for all the obvious benefits the various interactional platforms bring, they also encourage another modern day phenomenon. One with a terrible, sinister underbelly that gives voice to those previously considered quiet, mouse-like, introverted people. A virtual power that amplifies the booming opinions of those already with an overspill of self-importance.
Communal Anguished Hand Wringing.
In a bygone era, we’d laugh and the whole world would laugh with us. Indeed, the advent of social media most definitely helps in this regard. But Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also mentioned ‘weep, and you weep alone.’ This, though, is most definitely no longer the case.
It takes just one post on the platform of choice regarding a missed bin uplift; a patch of ice in the carpark; an overgrown bush on the school-route or a dog turd on the pavement and the breast-beating and wailing can be heard for miles.
See – everyone likes to be morally outraged these days. Everyone feels a need to empathise with a soul affronted. It’s their basic human right to do so, of course.
But why?
I reckon it’s all down to the fact we no longer have to queue for things. We Brits, loved queues. For all we moaned about them, it’s what we did. We’d do it voluntarily: at the post office, we’d happily wait in line for the dubious pleasure of being growled at by a caffeine-loaded, middle-aged counter-assistant with a grudge against mankind; at the bank, we’d queue to be mis-sold some over-priced, over-hyped, underperforming insurance product by a brow-beaten or brainwashed teller. And in the pub, we’d check with the punter stood next to us to ensure we hadn’t jumped their place.
I recently read that during the riots in England back in 2011, looters even formed an orderly, disorderly queue to enter and ransack stores in a burning London.
As a nation, we spent shed-loads of money in developing queuing systems. Manufacturers of retractable ropes and customer-routing paraphernalia were laughing all the way to the bank. Where they’d have to queue to lodge their money, and be mis-sold some over-priced, over-hyped, underperforming insurance product by a brow-beaten or brainwashed teller.
But we no longer queue. Everything is instant. Almost. Nobody sends letters so there’s no need for stamps. Social media has seen to that. Parcels arrive on your doorstep, if you’re lucky, from a warehouse the size of a planet via some harassed and underpaid courier in their white van. In short, nobody goes to the Post Office.
Banks are the playground of the devil, and continue to scare the pants off a public who still harbour trust issues. Nobody visits any more, and hence the increasing number of branch closures and the downward spiral to the potential armageddon of banking in thin air. And pubs? There are more expensive, ponsey-named craft beers on tap than punters these days. Badger’s Tadger, anyone?
Research conducted several years ago showed that British people will on average spend one year, two weeks and one day in queues for shops and the like. Well, not any more.
Gone now is the sense of community fostered by a good queue. The feeling of togetherness, the enjoyment of bumping our gums in communal complaint has been eroded. No longer can we share chagrin. Vanished forever is that odd sense of sharing in person that mutual enjoyment of outrage and, at the same time, blind acceptance.
Conversation in queues used to be civil. Other than complain of the wait itself, idle chat would revolve around the weather and last night’s television programmes.
Social media, though, now encourages the self-righteous. It provides a soap-box on which the easily affronted can stand. And the more gushing empathy they receive, the bolder they become.
Face to face conversation promotes mental forethought, for fear of being considered a right pratt. But the relative anonymity of social media emboldens and encourages a certain type of people to vent their righteous indignation and set up base camp just below the moral high ground.
So, bring back queues, I say. Flush the morally outraged into the open.
In fact, bring back fondue parties – ‘Generation Snowflake’ should experience the pangs of real anguish.
‘Physical Education,’ it was called, back in the day. Football; hockey; netball; cross-country running, and in my time, to a lesser extent, rugby. It was an eagerly awaited break from the mind-crushing monotony of Mr Methven’s Physics class. (I’m still bitter he chucked myself and Tony Everett out of his Higher class – can you tell? Presumably that was to ensure his teaching reflected a better pass rate.)
Boot would then crank up the dansette and drop the needle on track one, side one of Jimmy Shand and His Band, Greatest Hits (Volume 1) and quickly retreat to the arms of Horsey. A short demonstration was followed by carnage and mayhem, the like of which had never been seen on the hockey or football pitches.
See, back then, there was no plush limousine; no pre-dance celebration meal; no hired photographers. Nope. Instead, groups of lads would rush out their homes an hour or so before the scheduled start time, meet up at the pre-determined ‘secret’ rendezvous point (for us, it was ‘The Woods,’ for others, ‘Hungry Hill’) and unearth the illicit booze that had somehow been procured earlier. The tipple of choice for my group was El Dorado and Lanliq fortified wine and a couple cans of Carlsberg Special Brew or Newcastle Brown Ale.
Once in, you could relax. But not too much. It was best to keep moving. Dancing. Any period of inactivity would invariably induce a deep sleep on the spartan chairs that lined the Hall. Game over. Sick room and a phone call to your parents coupled by an instant grounding over Christmas would be the resultant consequence.
The things you find when clearing out your office!
It’s now seven years since I published my first book, ‘
Cee Tee Jackson 