The Social Media Hunger Games

The Daily Mail has quite a good record for showing helmet cam footage of cyclists being bullied and put in danger by motorists. I suppose it gives its readers a frisson of the dangers of the real world they often read of. You know, the real world outside suburbia where, if you read the Mail, scantily-dressed actresses are outnumbered only by Slovaks and illegal ISIS-supporting asylum seekers. And this goes for the latest Internet sensation, the owner of the Brew Cafe chain in South West London. That's not the independent Brew Cafe in Oxford, who are probably wishing they had a different name about now.

The best-rated comment on the Mail article currently is the Neanderthal who presumably thinks that a 50-year-old lookalike for a chubby Andy Parsons, apparently wearing a gimp suit and earphones to go for a drive in a Chelsea Tractor is some kind of role model. And so "Sonny Bill" of Lincoln gets top billing for telling us that he hates cyclists too. Presumably after pressing "Send" he sat there going "huh huh huh" for a bit then wondered why the man he could see in the mirror was staring at him a bit funny. Meanwhile the thousands who pressed "Like" went off to see if they could find their bottoms with both hands.

So what do we learn from this? Apart from that civilised people should avoid South West London and Lincoln, obviously? Well, I'm impressed with the BBC's "are you the hardest-working poor person in England" concept. It's been referred to as a kind of austerity Hunger Games. But I would point out that it's almost totally lacking in the composite bows, daggers and explosives that make the Hunger Games interesting.

So my proposal for the Hunger Games of Social Media is this. We get someone who liked Sonny Bill's post on the Mail, and almost any atheist commentor on the Guardian's "Comment is Free - Belief" page*.

We put the two of them in a room, put the cameras on them, and wait for either of them to saying anything showing signs of having been thought through and original. If this happens the one who wins it will be crowned "Media Monarch" and we let them out

It's gonna be boring TV for a few days, but I reckon one of them's eventually gonna get hungry and eat the other.

* I think my friend Tim commented on it once but I'm letting him off as he is capable of humour and independent thought. #notallatheists