After paedophilia, in the world of social media, perhaps the worst thing you can be accused of these days is heartlessness. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian recently wrote following the Westminster Bridge terror attack as follows : ‘Don’t fill pages of newspapers and hours of television and radio with words like fear, menace, horror, maniac, monster. Don’t let the mayor rush into print, screaming “don’t panic”. Don’t have the media trawl the world for pundits to speculate on “what Isis wants” and “how hard it is to protect ourselves from attack”. Don’t present London as a horror movie set. Don’t crave a home-grown Osama bin Laden. In other words, don’t pretend you are “carrying on as usual” when you are doing the precise opposite. When the prime minister stands up in parliament to announce, “We are not afraid,” the response is “why then is the entire government machine behaving as if it’s shit-scared?”’ For this sensible advice he was criticized in the Spectator by Stephen Daisley for being an “empathy patroller” or a policeman censoring emotion, Daisley going on to suggest that “no one can see your stiff upper lip if your head is in the sand.” Jenkins did not say that such incidents should not be reported. He just said they should be treated as crimes rather than political acts and given less of the prominence in the news that is their raison d’être.
I would suggest that, far from being infected with an excess of the stiff upper lip society in the social media world is afflicted by emotional incontinence. I would perhaps go further and say that there is a certain mentality that actively seeks out opportunities for emotional indulgence in acts of what I call ‘emotional vampirism.’ An example of this is a TV programme recently doing the rounds called “Being Mum and Dad” about how the footballer Rio Ferdinand coped with bringing up two small children after their mother died. It should go without saying (but it doesn’t regrettably) that the theoretical case of such a situation happening to anyone would elicit the reaction – “Oh how sad!” – from a normally adjusted adult. And yet it would remain just that, a theoretical situation with which we have no real emotional engagement. In spite of this we are regularly invited on social media to manufacture and rejoice in such engagement with people like Rio Ferdinand, people we don’t know and with whom we have no personal connection. Perhaps this is because he is a celebrity and, therefore, in a peculiar manner, a person with whom we are supposed to feel a connection. The same thing happened with the death of Princess Diana. Those of us who expressed the honest fact that we felt very little as a result of the unfortunate death of this blue-blooded woman were made to feel as though we were aliens who, instead of having three hearts, had none at all. In the meantime we carried on perfectly normally in our real emotional engagements with our loved ones and our friends.
At it’s worst this is a kind of bullying and is prevalent on social media. With headlines like “This will make you cry your eyes out” stories like that of poor Rio and his children (one might feel less sorry for Rio given that he can probably afford a lot more au pair hours than others in a similar situation) are foisted on us and, if we comment along the lines of my attitude in this piece, roundly chastised or abused for not falling into line in gushing sympathy. We have to parade our emotional credentials or be demonized as being unnatural. This really amounts to a form of manipulation or bullying and an oppressive refusal to allow us to think and feel as we, well, do actually think and feel. Be dragooned into emotional uniformity or we will accuse you of heartlessness or even psychopathy!
This kind of thing extends beyond the stories that tug at the heart-strings to the political sphere for emotional capital lies here too. Many a time in social media have I read political ”rants” that find their main virtue in the strength of emotional outrage expressed as if there is a direct relation between the correctness of the views being expressed and the intensity or “passion” with which they are voiced. This is especially true in progressivist narratives where the villains are usually the right wing who are seen as obstacles to progress and where there is really no room left for readers to demur let alone think about what has been said. The empassioned raver will sound off in such terms that might suggest that it is literally impossible to disagree with anyone who can sustain so much emotion for such a long time. In this sense feeling alone and, indeed, the spectacle of someone experiencing paroxysms of sentiment becomes its own justification. It seems emotion is now used to excuse anything and being on the wrong side of the emotional tracks is the worst sin imaginable. Well-adjusted people, are damned for being out of step with an emotional party line.
To pick up on the idea of emotional capital, the risk is that opportunities to generate emotion on social media become ends in themselves. People with whom, in the past, and at a distance, we might have sympathised or commiserated become a means to an end and that end is that they are the occasion for orgies of emotion, manufactured sympathy and advertising of the hearts many wear so publicly on their sleeves. In that sense, disabled people, people of colour, the sick, the bereaved, and the war-damaged become commodities that people trade in and which, incidentally, drive the advertising revenue of Facebook and Google.
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