The Problem Is Not Twitter

Rumors of Chris Pratt's being a 'MAGA Bro' show how Twitter's trending function can go haywire https://t.co/jJ299v4aop

— The Conversation US (@ConversationUS) October 29, 2020

I was the subject of very nasty and injurious gossip once.  It cost me my job as a pastor.  No big deal; it actually happens all the time.  People talk about their pastor.  Some people complain about their pastor, whoever that pastor is.  Some complain no matter what, some complain because the pastor is not their "choice."  I've seen people do both:  defend a pastor they favored, slander a pastor they never liked.  And some, as I say, never like the pastor, period.

Anyway, that kind of gossip makes its way around a congregation, and it can reach a tipping point where it turns rancid and the pastor's tenure there is over.  It happened to me, and although it ended more than 20 years ago, my ego still wants to point out that church never called another pastor after that who stayed as long as I had (three years), or another full-time pastor, and now they have merged with another congregation just to keep the church name alive (it's been in Houston before there was a "Houston").  The church imploded, IOW; it wasn't me (or just me, let's be fair and honest).

That kind of gossip spread like fire and it didn't need an algorithm or Twitter to make it happen.  In fact, in those days "Social media" was largely confined to fora like "Table Talk" at Salon.  There wasn't any, in other words.  I ended my pastorate there in 2001; Facebook wouldn't even get started until 2004.  Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school when I left, IOW.  Not that any of my parishioners would have used the internet, or even known what it was.  We did it the old fashioned way:  the telephone, and personal visits.  I'm sure you could have applied an algorithm to it to explain the phenomenon in mathematical terms; but why bother?  Tongues wag, exaggerations and speculation become lies, and pretty soon it's a prairie fire.  I could tell you stories about the lies told about me....

I won't, mostly because:  how do you know I'm not lying about the lies told about me?  And it was over 20  years ago, let it go. I bring it up to say that everything old is new again; that there is indeed nothing new under the sun.  The rumors about Chris Pratt on Twitter are precisely that:  rumors.  Are they damaging to Chris Pratt?  I have no idea.  I don't even care about them.  They are the fact I hang my observation on:  Twitter is not an advance, nor a decline, in Western civilization.  It's just the newest version of the telephone.  Party-line phones (where multiple parties shared a common phone line; common in rural areas where running a phone line was expensive, and no one person could bear that cost.  Ask your grandpa, punks!) became a comic trope where they were always busy with gossips sharing the latest "news" on everybody else in town.  Before telephones, it was the "back fence."  Again, the trope was wives hanging out the laundry (I remember doing that.  No one does it today because the air is too foul.  Laundered clothes are dirtier coming off the line than when they went in the wash.) who would talk over the fence to their neighbors, usually about their neighbors (you think they're gonna talk politics?).

It amuses me to see algorithms and "trending" cues blamed for gossip.  Without those, no one would use social media as much as they do.  It makes it easier to connect with people who want to talk about what we want to talk about.  And what we want to talk about, mostly, is other people.

Whether we know what we're talking about, or not.  Same as it ever was.  There was a passage from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, 4:18, in the original Greek, inscribed above a door at one of the dorms at my seminary.  Loosely translated it read "the things unseen are forever."  Given how much gossip that building produced, we all knew what Paul meant, and it had nothing to do with divine matters.  It was the much more earthly one of what people who knew other people told still other people about those people they both knew.  And especially the things presumably going on behind closed doors; the things unseen.  Gossip kept those things, speculated upon and unknown, alive forever.

Vanity of vanities.