Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark celebrates her win over Maria Sharpova at the 2014 U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York, August 31, 2014.RAY STUBBLEBINE/Reuters
I was watching Caroline Wozniacki steadily crush Sara Errani in the quarter finals of the U.S. Open this week when my wife said, "Do you realize you're talking to the TV?"
"Mmm, " I said. "I could watch her for hours."
What I like about the TV, you see, as opposed to the more social media of late, is that it doesn't talk back. I can think as I watch Ms. Wozniacki play tennis, a rewarding combination. My wife suspects I do it because Ms. Wozniacki is young (24) and blond and Viking-like, or because she became the butt of media gossip after Rory McIlroy, the world's best golfer and possibly the biggest idiot in Northern Ireland, broke off their engagement the day he saw the wedding invitations, or even because of her fetching Stella McCartney-designed tennis outfits, which combine streamlined athletic lines with medieval tavern-wench flirtiness.
In fact, I like to watch Ms. Wozniacki play tennis because she's so good at it. She's a patient counter-hitter with astonishing endurance, capable of sustaining a rally until her opponent makes an error, or misguesses, whereupon Ms. Woz cannons a double-hander down the line, as she did to the plucky but unlucky Ms. Errani again and again (6-0, 6-1). Men's tennis is so fast and serve-centered you can barely see what's happening. But you can actually study Ms. Wozniacki and, if you don't get distracted by the bouncing ball, you can learn a lot.
But by now I am used to being misunderstood on the Wozniacki file. I haven't been able to put a politically correct foot right all summer. I suspect I am not the only one. The world has been beset by horror and tragedy since the beginning of July, and yet – this is the irony of the shameless summer of 2014 – the starker the offence, the harder it is to figure out where you honestly stand, as opposed to where everybody else wants you to stand.
When Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot out of the sky by pro-Russian rebels over Donetsk, killing 295 innocent people, my first, instinctive reaction was the same as that of many other people: The perpetrators were inhuman sociopaths who needed to be found and punished and maybe even eliminated, possibly by a strong military response from the West. I remember thinking: You can't shoot innocent people out of the sky.
Then details began to come into focus, though never thanks to the rebels themselves, who did everything they could, physically and via social media, to prevent the rest of the world from understanding what had happened, to undermine our ability to lay blame for their terrible crime. Yes, the rocket was a weapon supplied by the Russians, but the attack wasn't intentional (whatever that meant): The rebels had mistaken the Boeing 777 for a Ukraine military supply plane, and punishing them for their ignorance was arguably pointless. Suddenly it was difficult to have a firm and unequivocal response even to that harsh and unequivocal tragedy. It turns out you can shoot innocent people out of the sky and get away with it.
And so a little more fear and darkness and unknowableness lodged themselves inside all of us, making it harder to proceed in the world, harder to know what is right and what is inarguably wrong, harder to believe in the project of a decent, well-intentioned future.
Which is what happens. But then it happened again and again. Israel and its enemy Hamas put on a shameless display of inhumanity all summer long in Gaza: There wasn't a morally decent square foot of ground to stand on, on either side. Hamas's provocations and deadly tactics (hiding weapons under schools) were no more supportable, at least if you didn't have a direct stake in the battle, than Israel's relentlessly unnuanced response (shelling beaches where children were playing, more than 2,000 Palestinians dead). "You can't discuss it with clients, even now," my barber, a Jewish resident of downtown Toronto, said the other day. The subject's too hot to talk about, never mind resolve.
If you prefer a more up-to-date dilemma, there is the shattering scandal in Rotherham, a hard-bitten working town near Leeds, England. According to an independent judicial report released last week, more than 1,400 white, working-class Rotherham girls between the ages of 12 and 14 have been stalked, gang-raped, re-raped, bought, sold and otherwise physically and psychologically tortured over the past 20 years by gangs of local Muslim men, mostly of Pakistani origin. Why didn't the police and the local authorities do anything sooner? Because, the report discovered, local politicians and police were afraid they would be outed as racists if they went after the gangs. That is conceivable only in a world where people's reputations can be manipulated via social media campaigns.
We think, of course, that we are better informed now because we gather information instantly, in real time, via iPads and cellphones, and that our opinions are therefore deserving of more respect. The hot summer in Gaza, for instance, was chronicled nonstop by both sides, engulfing Facebook and the Twittersphere and blogs and online sites with waves and counterwaves of ferocious propaganda.
Alas that is often all it was. Late in July, for instance, journalists at BBC Arabic discovered that Twitter pictures posted with the well-known hashtag #gazaunderattack were in fact recycled from 2007, and some weren't even pictures of Gaza. "I didn't actually know that the picture was recycled," a 16-year-old Twitter user told the BBC, as reported in The Independent. "People don't need to take it as a literal account. If you think of bombs going off, that's pretty much what it looks like." This is what passes for hard fact now. Gilad Lotan, the chief data scientist at betaworks, a digital consulting company in New York, analyzed thousands of social media messaging networks during the Gaza conflict and came to a conclusion he has since published in the web magazine Medium: "We're not seeing different viewpoints, but rather more of the same."
Developing a worthwhile opinion is hard work: It takes time, discipline, and thinking against yourself. Having an opinion because social media demands that you have one is a mug's game. The angrier and more passionate everyone becomes, myself included, the more I long to watch Caroline Wozniacki play tennis. She knows how to wait. You never know which way the point is going to go. But as long as she keeps the ball in play, there's a chance she'll hit a winner.