Poor Douglas Carswell. On Twitter last week he confused the gravitational effects of the sun and the moon and got crushed by the far stronger forces of social media.
It all happened so quickly. To illustrate the point that Britain trades more with its near neighbours in Europe than larger but more distant economies such as the US or China, Paul Nightingale, professor of science policy at the University of Sussex, tweeted a gravitational analogy that drew a brisk response from Carswell:
Nightingale respectfully pointed out the error but the hapless Ukip MP was immediately deluged in a yellow tide of piss-taking. An #AskCarswell hashtag soon popped up to poke further fun at the member for Clacton and the story was gleefully picked up by the press.
The derision was deserved – at least to some extent. In the eyes of many Carswell already has a difficult relationship with facts, revealed by his loud insistence during the referendum campaign that the UK would be better off to the tune of £350m a week if it left the EU, a claim repeatedly debunked by the head of the UK Statistics Authority. He had also been patronising in responding to the Sussex professor, expressing surprise that the “head of Science research at a university refutes idea sun’s gravity causes tides”. Yet it’s also true that Carswell was less wrong than many people realised. One tweeter pointed out that the sun’s gravitational influence on the tides is actually about 40% that of the moon’s, which was news to me — and I __have a degree in physics.
Judging from his timeline, Carswell has so far admitted no scientific error. Instead he tried to move the conversation back to trade and Brexit (though even here, the weight of evidence appears to be on Nightingale’s side). I suspect he was mildly embarrassed by the faux pas but felt little desire to acknowledge as much before the sneering chorus on Twitter. Why expose yourself to further mockery? But I’m speculating here – I’ve never met Carswell so don’t really know what makes him tick.
Today, the incident is largely forgotten. Just another twitterstorm in a teacup. But the trouble is that this is how it goes day after day on social media. Thanks to the internet, communication far beyond our real life social circles has never been easier but it’s hard to escape the impression that the quality of our public discourse has never been poorer. Carswell’s gravitational spat may pale beside the pervasive currents of misogyny, racism, homophobia, antisemitism and islamophobia that wash daily across the online world, but the descent into mockery and vitriol is all too rapid, whatever the topic. When was the last time you saw an enlightening exchange between a Corbynista and a Blairite?
What is it about life online that unleashes our inner demons? We seem to __have made a leap in technology for which evolution, in its blind stumbling, has not prepared us. Most likely it is another distancing effect, this time due to computerisation. We might now be able to connect with half the world but we do so from behind a keyboard. The faces – and the humanity – of the people that we interact with are easily lost in the rapid fire of typed exchanges. It is little wonder that some newspapers are closing down their comment threads. Though this may partly be for economic reasons, it is surely also an acknowledgement that they add little to public debate.
I’ve succumbed myself from time to time – and in these pages. I have on occasion taken exception to what I felt to be largely ill-founded critiques of science and scientists by the Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, and responded with outrage, with mockery and with facts. But after the latest exchange, I paused to re-consider. It might have been cathartic to vent my frustration and then to be cheered from the sidelines by friends and followers (almost all of them of a scientific stripe), but to what real end? We just seemed to be talking past one another.
So I tried a different tack. I bought a copy of one of my favourite popular science books (Matthew Cobb’s Life’s Greatest Secret) and sent it to the columnist with a conciliatory note, to follow up on the offer of buying him a drink that I had appended to my latest broadside. And blow me if he didn’t email back to accept the invitation.
A couple of weeks ago we met in a quiet bar around the corner from where I work and over a couple of pints of a rather tasty Kent lager talked about science, universities, Brexit, grammar schools, Northern Ireland, and the travails of online discourse. I won’t go into specifics since it was a private encounter but, while we still might not agree on everything, face-to-face there was plenty of cordiality and common ground.
I know what you’re thinking: “Two people who write for the Guardian had a drink and found that they agreed on some stuff? Big deal!” Well, yes, I’m skating on platitudinous ice and this is hardly an original point, but the meeting was to me an important reminder of how the human factor, so vivid in real life, is so readily forgotten online.
It’s complicated. Although anonymity is often blamed for online rudeness, it can also foster participation and risk-taking, opening up new opportunities for discussion. But how do we find the right balance between open, constructive argument and ending up in an echo-chamber? This question is at the core of the Guardian’s laudable The Web We Want campaign. There are no easy answers – though some experiments in nudging community self-regulation online are showing promise.
Even scientists need to be mindful of becoming trapped in tribal enclaves, whatever the provocation. On Twitter I try to use the mute button sparingly – only when the rancour gets too much. Each time I do feels like a defeat but I just don’t have the time or the heart to engage with every dispute. And although it’s not possible to have a drink with everyone you end up arguing with on the internet, I have resolved to try to imagine doing so. That strategy will make little headway with the out-and-out trolls or the shitposters, but there are still plenty of people of good faith out there that I disagree with profoundly. Carswell may well be one of them. Should we happen to rub up against one another online, hopefully at least one of us can take away something positive from the encounter.
The author is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College and is on Twitter as @Stephen_Curry, if you’re looking for an argument.
