Flaky Torontonians Ruin Internet for Everybody

More people clicked "attending" than actually attended a Toronto rally. Can the collapse of social media be far behind?

Not to harp on about a topic we at The Mark Newsroom have already ranted about, but what the hell is with the National Post’s hate-on for Toronto? Today Matt Gurney scrawled a daft little piece about how “notoriously flaky Torontonians” provided a “reality check” to anyone overestimating the power of social media. Apparently 2,300 people clicked “attending” to a Facebook-organized protest against the CRTC’s decision to allow usage-based internet billing last Friday, and a far smaller number of protesters showed up. According to Gurney, this is evidence both of the inherent lameness of Torontonians and “the myth of social media’s power.” Putting aside for a moment the fact that characterizing the entire city of Toronto as flaky is as intellectually lazy as calling Vancouver a metropolis of potheads or labeling Ottawans a bunch of bureaucratic pinheads, Gurney might want to consider the idea that maybe, just maybe, Industry Minister Tony Clement’s announcement the day before that he would make sure the CRTC’s decision is reversed might have dampened Torontonians desire to stand out in the cold and protest against something that is definitely not going to happen. We may be flaky, but we’re not stupid.

If there’s one person who doesn’t think social media is overrated, it’s Clement himself. According to an article in the Globe and Mail by Jane Taber, a recent study found that uber-tweeter Clement is a much more powerful presence on the internet than his boss Stephen Harper. All hail Tony Clement, our Virtual Prime Minister!

Gurney’s Post colleague John Duffy certainly doesn’t think the importance of social media has been overblown, in fact he believes the fate of history depends on it. In an interesting column he speculates on how the outcome of the Facebook-driven protests emerging in the Middle East could vindicate Samuel Huntington’s famous “clash of civilizations” theory. It’s a complicated point but we think the gist of it is this: if Arab terrorists learn to harness democratic media like the internet, it will prove that we are not all headed to a capitalist paradise in which Mark Zuckerberg is revered as a god. We might have misread that however.