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.

Holy cow there are some stupid people about

I realise that footballers are not known for their intelligence. (Bear with me, this is not a post about football posted to the wrong blog.) But this shows one of the particularly stupid ones. In case anybody's not completely aware of what his nonsensical English is trying to communicate, he appears to be one of the numerous people across the planet who believe that the 9/11 attacks were not the work of terrorists, but some kind of giant US Secret Service-led self-inflicted sham, whereby they blew up the towers themselves, killing thousands of Americans and others in the process, faked the planes striking the buildings with holograms or something(!!!) and then laid the blame at Al Qaeda's door to give them a mandate for their war(s) in the Middle East.

The breathtaking stupidity of this belief is hardly worth commenting on. Nor is the smug self-titling of the so-called 'Illuminati', those who smirk at the ignorance of non-believers and think they're in on some giant conspiracy that the rest of us simply can't see. I've got no time for any of that bollocks. Needless to say, his employers are taking a dim view of what he's written, being a) managed by people with an immediate understanding of the suffering of people involved in tragedy and b) owned by Americans, and he's removed the post since it hit the news.

Typical of the attitude of those 'in the know' conspiracy theorists, though, and in a further demonstration of a total disregard for (or ignorance of) the consequences of his comments, he's not exactly backing away from what he said with his later follow up. And here, as well as his stupidity and arrogance, he also brings to the party his complete ignorance of the function and place in society of Twitter. "If you don't like what I have to say un follow me!! Some things get took way out of context...", he says indignantly. What. The. Fuck??? 'Out of context'? It's Twitter, you total dickhead – exactly how were you expecting to contextualise a statement limited to 140 characters? Do you even know what 'out of context' means? And are you suggesting that what you meant was not the message conveyed by the first tweet?

The stupidity, insensitivity and disrespect for those who suffered or lost people in the attack, having to put up with ignorant wankers like him claiming their loss was a deliberate governmental act, really winds me up. Footballers as social commentators – here you see the result.