Tweetie Pie – a Dish Best Served Cold
Paul Simon’s ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover ’ predated social media, so the lyrics don’t refer to exiting a relationship via SMS, iMessage, BBM, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any of the myriad others. Something like ‘It’s not you, it’s me. Hope we can still be friends’, which so conveniently comes in at under Twitter’s 140 character limit.
This thought struck me when I was reading about the stormy Twitter row between Ben and Kate Goldsmith. They both come from aristocratic backgrounds (she is heiress to a Rothschild fortune, he is the son of a billionaire financier), and have been married since 2003. Recently he accused her of having an affair with a New Orleans rapper called Jay Electronica (whose real name disappointingly is Timothy Thedford) after an alleged domestic row, using Twitter as the medium. She responded in kind and the invective became increasingly shrill. Eventually it looked like calming down when they communicated the thought, via friends, that “Twitter is not the best forum to be near when you are feeling emotional”, and tweeting themselves that there would be no further comment. But Mrs Goldsmith couldn’t resist one more twist of the knife by changing her Twitter name to her maiden name KateRothschild, and lambasting critics over the weekend. I see no early reconciliation for this marriage, to the detriment of the parties concerned and their children.
Playing out conflict in a public forum has become increasingly easy because of the new media, but this does not reduce the toxicity to a relationship of spinning, leaking, name calling and so on. For example, only two weeks ago the Germans leaked information that Eurogroup executives had agreed that each member state should draw up a national plan to cope with a Greek exit from the Eurozone. This w