Insults. Abuse. From questions about my interviewing style to incredibly personal insults, I am sadly pretty used to being attacked online and yet, annoyingly, receiving it never gets any easier. But I had a strange experience this week.
I had the pleasure, as a journalist with a particular weakness for art galleries, to attend the press preview of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, an annual show that invites submissions from all artists, from amateurs to superstars.
Despite my appreciation of art, it was my first time at the Summer Exhibition and I was hooked from the moment I entered the gallery. Seeing so much work all over the walls, floors, ornate ceilings and various shelves and tables – and all for sale, too – was just thrilling.
I shared a few of the pieces that caught my eye afterwards on Instagram in an effort to showcase some of the beauty and talent teeming in these cavernous rooms. In my post I wrote of “wall goals” and a morning well spent. Then the comment came.
A man I don’t know wrote the following beneath my post: “It’s always the rich and famous that get in first to snap up the bargain! Not fair!!” With the angry Emoji used for swearing to finish his remark off. Charming.
But perhaps you think he had a point – except for the fact that he was wrong. The viewing was exactly what I had said it was: a press preview. Sales weren’t open for another two days. Nowhere in my post had I intimated otherwise.
So I did something I don’t often do anymore when people I don’t know write angrily, or worse, abuse me online and I replied. “The sale isn’t open yet,” I wrote. “It was a press preview. Hope you get something lovely.” His response? Swift and achingly polite and warm – a stark contrast to his original, pretty angry and factually inaccurate missive: “That’s reassuring, thanks!” With the praying hands Emoji.
An artist had already replied in the meantime reassuring said commenter that there were still lots of bargains to be had with her own indignant exclamation point – perhaps in response to his sharpness towards me.
But it was this man’s anger and readiness to believe that something I had done was wrong, unfair and needed calling out, that stayed with me. And it came to mind again on Thursday morning during an incredibly enjoyable on-air conversation with the writer, probably best known for his work on Doctor Who, Steven Moffat.
We were speaking on the Today programme ahead of a new four-part ITV drama called Douglas is Cancelled, which is out later this month and stars Hugh Bonneville. It tells the story of a much-loved newsreader being cancelled after a video of him telling a sexist joke at a party is shared on social media and goes viral.
Moffat deliberately doesn’t share with the audience what the joke is until towards the end of the series as he says he wants people to decide whether Douglas should be cancelled before knowing.
But he also believes, “everyone wants to cancel somebody”, as he told me on the programme. He went on to quip: “It’s very easy to say you are against cancelling someone until you hear something and then you say ‘we should cancel that one’. No one wants Gary Glitter to have a podcast do they? We are well in favour of cancelling him.”
And it is that instinct I am intrigued by. What is it that makes people want to do that to each other and, more often than not, reach for the very worst conclusions about our fellow woman?
As Moffat went on to aptly observe: “People have always been cancelled – it’s just so much quicker now. The membrane between you and the howling mob is so thin. Everyone is a camera crew. It can happen so quickly now.” That membrane is very thin indeed and while that development can come with positives – allowing people to get closer to each other – it has also led to a darkening and coarsening of our interactions.
To go back to my commenter, and bearing in mind that I am sharing a milder example of some of the harsher stuff I receive online, I don’t think he was trying to cancel me per se but he was trying to do something akin to it: shaming me for seeming elite, privileged with an advantage he didn’t have, while publicising an untruth.
And it didn’t feel good or fair to be on the receiving end, hence my polite but firm reply. (Incidentally, I have deleted his response and my own because I don’t wish for there to be a pile-on.)
Perhaps he didn’t have those intentions. Perhaps he was just mad about art and mad in the moment. You never can tell. But I am always astounded by how polite some of the rudest people can be if you reply politely and engage. I have taken this course a few times and it nearly always concludes in the same way. Me replying reminds someone that there is a human receiving the message and they quickly apologise or sound regret for the initial harsh tone of their message – which is usually public.
But to turn attention back to the human instinct that has so many of us automatically assume the worst of someone and follow someone’s public downfall, post by post, moment by moment. What is it? Why do we do it and can we only dampen our enthusiasm for cancellations through extreme empathy – that is, only if it happens to us or someone we are very close to?
Those are the questions we should better explore – as well as the actions of the person being cancelled, should they actually merit such a response. But how we judge that is also, at times, difficult to do well and questionable, depending on how reliable our sources are.
Linked to this is also our capacity, or lack thereof, to forgive people. I have long been fascinated by the anatomy of the public apology. How swift they often are these days. Some of them even have a predictable template. But are they real or just face-saving gestures? How can people truly forgive others, often people they will never meet, if the apology seems too perfect, too swift and lacking in any evidence of understanding why the wrong thing was wrong in the first place? Other than being told by thousands of people they don’t know on social media that it was, well, wrong.
Quick to judge, slow to forgive – these are the times we still live in. But not always and it doesn’t have to be like this. We can each control our own responses and remember there is always a human on the other side of the screen.
Emma Barnett presents the ‘Today’ programme on BBC Radio 4