August 31 is Positive Twitter Day – but does enforced civility miss the mark?
The background
Friday, August 31 is Positive Twitter Day, “a day for saying what you’re positive about + civility towards your usual adversaries”, according to originator Sunder Katwala, director of immigration thinktank British Future who tweets under the handle @sundersays.
A laudable exercise in civic participation, right? Especially in these days of Twitter trolling and stoning?
Maybe not.
For it
Among those supporting the day is Paul Staines, better known to the Internets as the perpetually snarky and sometimes petulant Guido Fawkes. Blunting his barbed wit for the day, he wrote, “Twitter, especially the political Twittersphere can be a horrible nasty place, well today Guido will do his Christian best to be nice to all in his tweets.”
Against it
But Mic Wright, blogging at The Telegraph , breathed a disgusted sigh: “Can you think of anything worse than false bonhomie? The virtual gritting of teeth to express only bland sentiments that won’t upset anyone? The entire idea makes my teeth itch, especially when one of its main proponents is the normally delightfully acidic Guido Fawkes.” Declaring that “False politeness is one of America’s worst inventions”, Wright suggested, “A successful Positive Twitter Day is a boring Twitter day. And who really wants that?”
But it is #PositiveTwitterDay
So Katwala, who highlighted Wright’s blog on his Twitter feed, was honour-bound to be nice about it. And he was, calling Wright’s piece an “eloquently argued objection”.
Welcome to
#positivetwitterday – a day for saying what you’re positive about + civility towards your usual adversaries twitter.com/sundersays/sta…— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) August 31, 2012
@sundersays You ask the impossible
— Siren of Brixton (@SirenofBrixton) August 31, 2012
