Twitoutrage, Blogs and Context.

Chris Evans just made a comment about women and football on Radio 2 and then had to interrupt a song to say he had not meant it and that it was a response to something his female co-presenter had said about Boys and Games rooms.

This is the problem - unless you see the whole conversation then often you can fail to understand what is actually happening. Now the two worst places for getting the wrong end of a conversation are Twitter and Blogs. Twitter with 140 characters gives little freedom for discussion and so the Twitosphere often descends into Twitoutrage. Blogs are also misleading because they are edited and personal. They are not objective and so the author can edit the comments of others to fit the context that they want to present them in.

Lets say I was trying to campaign against sexism at the BBC I could now take Chris Evans' comments completely out of context and write a Blog. It would say - look this is an example of the disgusting sexism that needs investigating with an independent inquiry. Blah Blah Blah - this is political and points scoring. It is obvious in this case that there is nothing there but there are many more cases every day where Blogs are written like this and it gets harder and harder to distinguish the real from the politicised.