How to tweet bile without alienating people. Or making 13-year-old girls cry

[Violet_Crumble]

Charlie Brooker
The Guardian, Monday 28 March 2011

Not so long ago, if you wanted to issue a 13-year-old girl with a blood-curdling death threat, you had to scrawl it on a sheet of paper, wrap it round a brick, hurl it through her bedroom window, and scarper before her dad ran out of the front door to beat you insensible with a dustbuster. Now, thanks to Twitter, hundreds of thousands of people can simultaneously surround her online screaming abuse until she bursts into tears. Hooray for civilisation.

That's in effect what happened the other week in the Rebecca Black "Friday" affair. In case you're not aware of it, the trail of events runs as follows: 1) Parents of 13-year-old Rebecca pay $2,000 for her to record a song (and video) called Friday with a company called ARK Music Factory, a kind of vanity-publishing record label specialising in creepy tweenie pop songs. 2) The song turns out to be excruciatingly vapid, albeit weirdly catchy. 3) It quickly racks up 40m views on YouTube, mainly from people marvelling at its compelling awfulness. 4) Rebecca is targeted on Twitter by thousands of abusive idiots calling her a "bitch" and a "whore" and urging her to commit suicide. 5) She gets very, very upset. 6) Thanks to all the attention, the single becomes a hit. 7) Rebecca becomes an overnight celebrity, goes on The Tonight Show, and donates the proceeds from Friday to the Japan relief effort. So the story had a happy ending, at least for now. But it marks a watershed moment in the history of online discourse: the point where the wave of bile and snark finally broke and rolled back.

God knows I enjoy a helping of bile. But only when it's crafted with flair. One of the most disappointing things about the slew of online Rebecca Black abuse is the sheer poverty of language involved. If you are complaining about a banal pop song but can't muster a more inventive way to express yourself than typing "OMFG BITCH YOU SUCK", then you really ought to consider folding your laptop shut and sitting quietly in the corner until that fallow lifespan of yours eventually reaches its conclusion.

The other crucial component of an artful slagging is not a "sense" of perspective but an "awareness" of it. It can be amusing to knowingly punch out 10,000 words feverishly declaring Justin Bieber to be some kind of squawking terrorist weapon – but it only works when the author's comic desperation is at least 50% of the joke. The (brilliant) comedian Jerry Sadowitz's entire act consists of him shouting indefensibly hideous things about everybody on Earth, and yet he never feels like a bully, more a frenzied marionette jerked around by uncontrollable despair: a sort of self-hating dirty bomb.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/charlie-brooker-rebecca-black-friday

[Ilsa]

1. Anybody can be published, virtually, these days, though few have

anything worth reading.

It's a sad commentary, in my opinion, when so many people feel the need to pile criticism of a 13 year old, whether they do so with originality and flourish or not.

[Blue_Tires]

2. I never got the outrage over the song, either...

Yeah, I didn't like it, but then again I'm no longer a suburban 13-year-old, either...

I'm pretty sure the song is awful, but then again I wouldn't know the difference -- 99 percent of music has been awful to my ears since, say 1998...The kid deserves credit for following her dream and handling her internet notoriety like an adult...

[MineralMan]

3. Yup. The internet gives everyone the ability to publish

whatever thoughts they might have. That's freedom. The internet also lets people do it more or less anonymously. That eliminates the accountability that used to hold people in check a bit.

So, every moron can publish vile attacks on anyone with complete impunity. That's a problem.

There doesn't seem to be any way, though, to turn things back and to restore that accountability for one's words that once tempered public discourse. That's too bad.