Another Twit

Oh the perils of Twitter. A few months back I wrote this piece about an idiot footballer claiming that comments posted on Twitter had been 'taken out of context'. He, at least, has some defence in that people expect footballers to be stupid - you would not, though, anticipate that an experienced politician, one who stood for the leadership of the Labour Party in fact, could be similarly idiotic.

But Diane Abbot has fallen foul of exactly the same problem. Here's the background to what she said and how she's back-tracking. As I've said before, to blame context for the 'misinterpretation' of anything said on Twitter, a medium which permits just 140 characters per message I believe, is monumentally stupid. Diane Abbott has been a voluble and high-profile campaigner for racial equality, so to issue such a crass and thoughtless statement on Twitter, something seemingly entirely contradictory to the message she usually campaigns for, is so naive as to be almost beyond comprehension.

In the immediate aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence trial, and with the Suarez racism row still all over the sports pages, race relations are at the top of the news and political agenda in this country at the moment. It's a time where we're examining our attitudes to race as a society, examining the way people of different cultures interact with each other in Britain. A time where passions on this could run high. Context, if you're to make any kind of comment on these matters, is bloody important.

Twitter doesn't do context. It's about immediacy. It absolutely exemplifies the modern mass media. Her comment was apparently in response to an earlier message complaining about the term 'black community' lazily grouping all people of non-white ethnicities together as if they're all the same. That will, of course, be lost in the shit storm that the press now stir up about her Tweet, because there's a lot more mileage in it for them.

The last bit of that Beeb report, on a later Abbott Tweet, shows up her lack of understanding of what was likely to happen and, if anything, makes her naivety even worse: "Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th Century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters." So she admits that you can't contextualise a 140 character statement, but went ahead and put it out there anyway, knowing that the medium she was using was inadequate for the task. The mind bloody boggles.