Trending in Oblivion

Is the end of the world upon us?  You might think so, judging by the online furore caused by the current global outages of Facebook and Whats App.  As someone who doesn't have much time for social media, this sort of thing doesn't really effect me,but I'm always fascinated by the frenzied reactions in engenders in those who do.  Most of these reactions, of course, are expressed via the social media sites that stay up, in this case, mainly Twitter.  With everything else going on right now - yet more revelations about the shady financial dealings of the wealthy and powerful, fuel shortages, empty supermarket shelves, police scandals, all in the UK alone - it is somewhat disconcerting to see Facebook outages apparently dominating Twitter.  If the trending hashtags are to be believed, that is.  I learned a long time ago, though, that it is possible to get just about anything trending on Twitter, even if only for a short period, if a group of committed users simply keep tweeting their chosen hashtag.  It doesn't even have to be big group, just so long as you can mobilise them - once it gets a bit of traction, all manner of opportunists and bots will jump on the bandwagon and keep it going for a while longer.  At which point those behind getting the hashtag going start crowing about how they've struck a blow for whatever 'cause' they think they are pursuing, or against whichever 'institution' they think they can brig down.

The trouble is that hashtags simply have no impact in the real world.  If they did, then by now the Tory government would have fallen, various ministers would be facing criminal charges and Labour would have won a landslide victory under Jeremy Corbyn.  Except that none of these things happened because the hashtags associated with them were never going to influence the majority of people who could make such changes, because they aren't on Twitter and even if they are, they pay no attention to hashtags.  Just as the people who get these things trending aren't really representative of Twitter users as a whole, so Twitter users as a whole aren't representative of the general population.  They are a tiny minority.  The problem is that the activists on Twitter just don't seem to grasp this, seemingly thinking that where they lead, the rest of the world follows.  But it doesn't.  They waste their energies there, thinking that they are making a difference to the world by getting a hashtag trending instead of actually going out where it matters and trying to get their message across.  On Twitter they are, by and large, simply preaching to the converted as those perpetuating a hashtag are those already sympathetic rather than those converted to the cause.  Which, undoubtedly, is why Corbynism failed - it was an entirely self-regarding, inward looking political creed that seemingly couldn't understand the need to persuade others over to your viewpoint, instead hectoring, brow-beating, patronising and attempting to shame those who even only mildly disagreed with them.  All of which is yet another reason that I have little time for social media: it is a fly trap that draws in people and encourages them to believe that they have a 'voice' and are being 'influential' when, in reality, they are simply talking to themselves all the time.