I don’t know how many of my readers are regular users of social media such as facebook. For some time, however, I have been aware of a distinctive pattern of use that I call the “facebook ambush”. (I dare say that the same problem features in other social media also.) What I have in mind is the way in which some users will pop their heads above the metaphorical parapet, loose off a shot, and then duck down again, rather like the old bandits in the Wild West movies.
The particular focus of these ambushes in the case of my own account is politics, but I don’t see why other areas of life should not attract the same pattern of behaviour. The “shot” often consists of a dogmatic statement of some kind, unsupported by any evidence, which is intended not to begin a discussion but simply to score a “hit”. Equally often the ambush takes the form of a “sharing” of some statistical claim with political relevance, without (generally speaking) any evidence that the “shooter” has any appreciation of the possible statistical pitfalls that attend their statement.
Incidentally, the experience that has activated me on this occasion was an attack on anybody who has the temerity to question the capability of Jeremy Corbyn (the leader of our Labour Party) to head a government. I don’t have it in for Corbyn, and I do admit that our press has generally given him an unduly rough time. Nevertheless, I am aware that there is a discussion to be had about the degree to which his leadership of his own party might, or might not, give one reason to question his likely performance as head of a national government.
The long-standing friend (not just a facebook “friend”) who laid the ambush on this occasion is, I know, a devoted member of Corby’s Labour Party, nevertheless I don’t think that it is out of order to ask that he doesn’t duck back behind his barricade, having loosed off his shot, but remains to debate some of the complexities of the question. So I responded to him along those lines, merely suggesting that the matter was rather more open than he seemed to be suggesting. I await a response, but it is early days yet.
I’ve decided, on the basis of this experience, to begin to challenge regularly people who lay ambushes of this kind …. and not only those with political intention. (I am also subject to ambushes with a religious or an artistic intention.) My intention is to make it a matter of course that I ask people to be prepared to defend, and preferably to qualify, the dogmatic and generally unsubtle missiles that they sling at me …. at least, if they want to remain my friends (or “friends”.) It will be interesting to see how this works out.