Roger Moroney: Socially spreading the word ... and words

Anyone who knows Sir Peter Leitch knows he has a rough-edged sense of humour, writes Roger Moroney.

In this slightly bewildering day and age of social media you can't say or do anything.

Especially if you're having a meal at some restaurant on Waiheke Island and someone stops by to say gidday ... and you make some un-PC comment which had it been said in the days before the invasion of social media probably wouldn't have gone anywhere.

Sir Peter Leitch, the Mad Butcher, found himself butchered on social media by someone who figured his apparently whimsical remark was racist.

Yes it could have been taken that way, but anyone who knows Sir Peter knows he has a rough-edged sense of humour, and the last thing he has ever set out to do is be offensive to anyone.

I only met him very briefly once years back and remember him chirpily calling me "mate" despite the fact he'd never met me before and we spent less than 10 seconds in passing "gidday" conversation.

The race relations team got involved as did hundreds of social media devotees who took sides where they felt sides should be taken.

I thought back to my early working days in the woolstores where the diversity of humankind was so ... diverse ... no one gave anything a second thought.

Had social media been alive and kicking then, and if anyone decided to take offence to anything they heard, then the place would have been a shambles.

But we laughed and niggled each other and, yeah, occasionally remarks were made (in both directions) about the ethnicity of one another and the result was usually laughter.

And at the closure of another sweaty, muscle-tearing day we'd all head for the pub and laugh it up and accuse each other of missing out on getting a round the week before.

Just mates.

Mates whose remarks would, I daresay in this age of social media madness, be construed by some as either libellous, racist or malicious.

But they were no such thing.

We were all simply hard-working lads ... one for all and all for one.

I don't think Sir Peter was being intentionally racist because I don't think such things sit comfortably with him.

Okay, it may not have been the flashest thing to say in hindsight but I get the feeling had it been a throwaway line by anyone else, particularly anyone else who is not a well-known identity or celebrity, it would have simply dissolved into the ether.

But in this day and age the social media landscape is big and getting bigger.
People can say what they like, write what they like, post what they like and then open the doors for other screen-addicted individuals to join the on-line party.

To me it all makes about the same amount of sense as Donald Trump embracing Twitter on the scale he does.

This guy is lined up to become arguably one of the most powerful politicians and leaders in the world ... and he's posting little throwaway remarks on Twitter.

Even remarks which are politically unsettling because everyone can read them and everyone can get a clear picture of where his head is at.

He has pointed barbs at Russia and North Korea ... via Twitter.

His press and publicity people have no say and they have no influence over what they believe could and should be said, and how it should be phrased ... just in case someone takes offence.

Which someone generally does.

The only sensible thing Donny-boy has said lately was, indeed, about the great tentacles of computerdom.

It was all about the emergence of suspected Russian hacking, and hacking from any other "interested" country for that matter.

As his former opponent Hillary Clinton discovered, websites and email files can be broken into.

Remember the time when Sony got hacked a year or so back?

Mr Trump noted all this and said the best way to steer a path clear of the threat of personal, political and business site hacking was to write the message on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and mail it.

Person to person ... nothing more.

Threat removed.

However, given his unsettling attachment to Twitter I doubt he will follow his own sound advice.