Let us all opine together
One of my jobs as a columnist is to walk into a movie theatre with 200 people, on the opening day of Avengers: Endgame, and yell: “Don’t waste your time folks! Iron Man, Captain America and Black Widow — they all die in the end!” and run out giggling. Apparently, this is exactly what an idiotic man in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, did as he walked out of an earlier screening of the movie while folks were queueing to get in. They beat him within an inch of his life.
And this is exactly what I did on Facebook last week. Two years ago, Absa launched its new-look logo and “Africanacity” identity. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp lost their ish. Schoolteachers, plumbers, biochemists, medical doctors and even Eskom engineers suddenly discovered the smouldering, passionate graphic designers inside them. Land expropriation without compensation, the success of the “Zuma Must Go” campaign, the abysmal performance of the Chokin’ Proteas and the exodus from the DA to the FF Plus — all these were relegated to sideshows as South Africans expressed their outrage at what some described as “an abomination”.
To say I was fazed is like saying that the New Dawn has been a bit wobbly. For starters, I have absolutely nothing invested in any bank’s logo — or any other institution’s branding, for that matter. (OK, that’s not entirely true. I have always felt that if you gave a bunch of grade Rs crayons, they would have come up with a better flag than this hideous Rainbow Nation monstrosity. It even looks a little bit like a Crayola box.)
But let’s get back to my Facebook social experiment. What I did last week was ask my friends if they remember being outraged by the logo. Did they vote with their feet and withdraw all their money?
Only a handful of my friends sheepishly admitted that they didn’t exactly remember what had raised their ire two years ago or even what the old logo looked like. For the most part, however, the experiment worked. Most went into an impressive display of selfdefence. All of a sudden, I had, in one post, rekindled their passion. The words “dull”, “laziness” and “uninspired” flew again.
I was thoroughly entertained, considering that these are folks who hadn’t thought about the logo for two years, despite seeing it a million times on TV ads, billboards and filling-station ATMs.
There are two things I took from this social experiment. The first is pretty obvious. The genius of Facebook, Twitter and other social
‘I have a smartphone, I have 10 gigs of data and I have opposable thumbs. What ever shall I do about this alignment of factors?’
media platforms is the realisation by Zuckerberg & Co that humans have an uncontrollable urge to voice an opinion.
In fact, I reckon that there is an inversely proportional correlation between the amount of knowledge of any particular subject and the urge to voice an opinion about it. The less folks know about oh, I don’t know, what dolus eventualis means, the more likely they are to pronounce confidently on advocate Barry Roux’s “unwise” strategy in the Oscar Pistorius case.
Until that case, I had been unaware that my people were such keen students of the law. And until Sundowns recently caught up with Chiefs in the Absa Premiership, I bet Ernst Middendorp didn’t realise that millions of Chiefs supporters knew so much about the folly of using dead-ball situations to get goals.
But that’s the whole point of social media isn’t it? It’s a case of, “Well, I have a smartphone, I have downloaded the Twitter app, I have 10 gigs of data and I have opposable thumbs. What ever shall I do about this alignment of factors?”
Commenting on social media is the equivalent of picking up a guitar and strumming it despite your utter lack of interest in it, purely because it was lying there.
My second take-out from my social experiment is that folks are incapable of appreciating irony. They miss irony like a 12-year-old boy misses the toilet bowl in the morning. Of course, boys grow into men who miss the “sweet spot” between the sheets. One fellow was apparently missing so badly, his lover chanted “Cremora” throughout the whole thing. When he was done, he asked what that was about. She rolled her eyes and, in exasperation, yelled, “It’s not inside it’s on … top!”