Armchair twitter aficionados managed to track down a gang of
thugs who had put two victims in hospital after a brutal beating. Within eight minutes of the police releasing
CCTV footage (remarkably clear compared to the usual hazy footage) of the gang
walking down a Philadelphia pavement.
The sleuths used Facebook pictures to find the first thug. Success in tracking down the rest soon
followed. The thugs like all of us post
photographs on Facebook of them in large groups celebrating. This perennial desire to take selfies, share
personal information, names and details online became a breadcrumb trail to all
the gang members. The whole thing
triggered by a single twitter on the attack.
The police were able to arrest the whole gang swiftly. A tale of success is a rare event in our
online existence. Usually, online
presence is a contributor to bullying, abuse, an invitation to porn, a conduit
to online gambling etc none of which have outcomes usually of much benefit to
mankind.
My mother’s hometown of Ballymoney in Northern Ireland has
spent money buying huge live-like photographs to stick in shop windows in
derelict streets.
It has become all the
rage and Belfast etc abounds in these fake shops. You drive past a camera shop, flower shop, an old fashioned bakery
that remind you of villages of childhood. All completely fake.
Instead of boarded up premises you seem to
see quaint country life around you.
Even a fake walled garden with flowers peeping around corners. One old cinema has for several years had
pasted across it an optimistic sign across its front in foot high print proudly
boasting “New hotel to be built here 2012”.
No one bothers to change the date so the lie continues to boost of
forthcoming non-existing developments.
I’m not sure why but all of this plunges me into despair. It reminds me of Catherine the Great’s 18th
century triumphal procession through the streets of Russia. When fronts of buildings on the route were
made to look grand and areas spruced up to create a pleasing spectacle for the
Empress as she passed. These hid from
her sight the destitution and poverty that existed (or so the legend goes).
When was it that we learned to shut off our brains to the
truth? That having a pretence of
normality was better than acknowledging facts?
In these days when the gap between the rich and the poor has never been
wider, the general public’s time is channelled into buying someone else’s
rubbish or lining the pockets of the rich via clever schemes. Our virtual online web placates us while a
growing proportion (perhaps 37%-70%) is devoted to porn. Turn to the local newspaper (tabloid) and find what illuminates
the general public today. They are
aimed at those with an average reading age of 11, I kid you not! The Sun is famous for many tragic covers,
but remains the most popular tabloid.
For example “The Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough football stadium
disaster in Sheffield on 15 April 1989, in which 96 people died as a
result of their injuries, proved to be, as the paper later admitted, the
"most terrible" blunder in its history.” They claimed “ that some fans picked the pockets of crushed
victims, that others urinated on members of the emergency services as they tried
to help and that some even assaulted a police constable "whilst he was
administering the kiss of life to a patient.”
All complete rot but it took over two decades before the truth was
allowed to emerge. Another memorable
release was On 17 November 1989, The Sun headlined a page 2 news
story titled "STRAIGHT SEX CANNOT GIVE YOU AIDS –
OFFICIAL."
Oh yes, indeed
these guys have no morals or squeamishness about publishing complete lies. The Sun remains popular to this day but in
Liverpool because of the Hillsborough coverage it is still not favoured. The northern populace has a long memory of
the Sun’s betrayal of the truth and many newspaper shops to this day refuse to
even stock the paper. Such tabloids
brimming with salacious titbits and massive misinformation are I fear unlikely
to produce an enlightened populace.
