And yes, including the @name of people who are then bombarded with critical tweets is one of the main issues.

Things did reach a point last year where I felt that things were getting a little too heated for my personal tastes on social media. I had previously thought that councillors and officers being on social media was probably a good way to make them more accessible but I think that was perhaps a little naïve.

There’s been some interesting stuff by tech-critic Evgeny Morozov regarding what social media is doing to political debate. In the US it’s credited with creating the much more partisan atmosphere that gave rise to the Tea Party movement. It tends to turn things very binary with an ever present default towards rhetorical inflation and a loss of civility. It’s also highly addictive (designed as such by profit hungry tech companies) , which in itself distorts perspective.

It’s against the ‘trust no-one’ spirit of the age to argue that people who go into local government of all parties probably deserve some basic respect for giving up their time for very little reward and an awful lot of hassle. That doesn’t mean giving them a free ride but it does mean allowing them to do the job to which they’ve been elected without throwing abuse at them or hassling them for hours a day, day after day about points of contention.

Just read a really interesting book – ‘The End Of Absence’ by Michael Harris ( http://www.endofabsence.com/ ) who touches upon some of these issues. He hopefully argues that we’re still in the naïve phase of social media and excesses are happening all the time. In due course we’ll learn new rules of civility and bring a bit more mindfulness to the proceedings.

On the day I deleted my personal Twitter I saw a councillor was being called ‘thick’ by people who claim to have a degree of knowledge to bring to the debate. Said councillor was included in the Tweet and it was being RT’d. I think sometimes people forget there’s a human being on the other end.

What I did want to say though is that when I listened to the review above, I felt like the message was to all of us citizens, not just ‘the council’. Having seen part of Thursday’s council meeting on that link above (first half and the pubs discussion in the second part) it did seem more tolerant and calm and cheerful, which was good, I thought. But on Twitter it seemed just the same, quite intense, and I find that quite difficult. I guess that’s a personality thing, we’re all different.