Lessons in Quakerism for Sunday

Charlie Brooker this week is, as usual, brilliant:

Not so long ago, if you wanted to issue a 13-year-old girl with a blood-curdling death threat, you had to scrawl it on a sheet of paper, wrap it round a brick, hurl it through her bedroom window, and scarper before her dad ran out of the front door to beat you insensible with a dustbuster. Now, thanks to Twitter, hundreds of thousands of people can simultaneously surround her online screaming abuse until she bursts into tears. Hooray for civilisation.

He's writing about the treatment of Rebecca Black, whose home-made music video on YouTube made it into the news for prompting an extraordinary wave of anonymous bullying from people on YouTube and Twitter.

In case you're not aware of it, the trail of events runs as follows: 1) Parents of 13-year-old Rebecca pay $2,000 for her to record a song (and video) called Friday with a company called ARK Music Factory, a kind of vanity-publishing record label specialising in creepy tweenie pop songs. 2) The song turns out to be excruciatingly vapid, albeit weirdly catchy. 3) It quickly racks up 40m views on YouTube, mainly from people marvelling at its compelling awfulness. 4) Rebecca is targeted on Twitter by thousands of abusive idiots calling her a "bitch" and a "whore" and urging her to commit suicide. 5) She gets very, very upset. 6) Thanks to all the attention, the single becomes a hit. 7) Rebecca becomes an overnight celebrity, goes on The Tonight Show, and donates the proceeds from Friday to the Japan relief effort. So the story had a happy ending, at least for now. But it marks a watershed moment in the history of online discourse: the point where the wave of bile and snark finally broke and rolled back.

Mindfulness is something I have a tough time with - I'm quick to anger and I'm quick to judge. I have said mean, hurtful things about people in the past and, God help me, I've even put some of them on the internet. So at risk of sounding maudlin, it's my experience that being mindful that of God in everyone is extraordinarily challenging - it does not come without much practice and hard work. And I'm not there yet. But, speaking as someone who says boneheaded things a lot, when I do take the time to think about what I'm saying, usually what eventually does come out is a lot less boneheaded.

I mean, no duh, right? But it's important. It's very important.