IT is almost impossible to raise a topic like tourism, climate or housing without opinions dividing like Moses and the Red Sea. For those of us who are daft enough to persist in raising difficult topics, walking the line is like juggling chainsaws.
In the pre-apocalyptic hellscape which is 2024, things are either good or bad. No in-between. Politicians are saviours or dictators. They have to achieve everything or they achieve nothing. In Keir Starmer’s case, he’s not fixed everything in seven days and is already being slammed.
In rural areas, the topics get more granular but no less polarised. If you raise concerns about housing, you are accused of stirring up hatred against second homeowners. Tourists are either laying golden eggs we cannot survive without or they are destroying the places they visit. If you raise concerns about tourism, you hate tourists and the associated businesses.
If you like turbines or don’t feel the need to protest against pylons, you must hate sharks, or birds, or the landscape – possibly all three. If you ask questions about pay-to-play crofting, you must hate incomers. If you cut peat, you must therefore want everyone to die in a climate event.
If you have a wood-burning stove, you must hate the environment and almost certainly wish asthma on toddlers. Ask campervans to behave more responsibly and you are driving them out of the islands. Asking visitors to pay for their pitches and park responsibly is – and I quote from Tiree social media this week – “exploiting” them.
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We see this binary everywhere – and most acutely where topics are difficult and complex and full of shades of grey. It’s particularly visible in communities like my own, where multiple competing interests are at play and the stakes are very high.
As someone who enjoys the unrelenting misery of social media, it’s fascinating to watch – and it is so easy to fall into the trap of picking sides and making knee-jerk responses. I am no saint – I do it all too often. I clock my behaviour all too infrequently and always too late. Social media is driving our steady descent into the tribal. After all, like a turtle on a fence post, we are no more than chimps elevated far beyond our abilities to cope well – and big tech knows it.
When you build software, the logic behind the user journey is exactly the same as is used to train animals. What path does the user need to take to make them more likely to come back and do something again? The goal is that they spend money – but the side effect is undoubtedly broader behavioural change.
On social media, we get likes, or a sense of superiority, a moral high ground to plant a flag on until the next hill to die on catches our eye. The app developers know that the quicker they can give you that dopamine hit, the quicker you will return for the next one.
They work out how to develop an app by studying the user journey and identifying the actions a user takes which makes them statistically more likely to take the next action they want. Then they optimise for that – it’s called the happy path – driving engagement and satisfaction. Rinse and repeat.
It’s why you keep refreshing, or scrolling Facebook when you didn’t mean to. The tabloids have had it down to a fine art for a long time now. Headlines that create a splash and evoke a strong feeling. If they resonate with the audience and affirm their beliefs or stoke their fears, then you will sell another one.
And so we descend ever further into the vicious cycle of pressing the like/cry/love button without a thought – forgetting that there’s a person at the other end. We press our internal “instant hate” button every time someone we disagree with opens their mouth – deciding our opinion on a difficult topic before we have heard any arguments at all.
But when we all stop pounding our keyboards and look around, there are so many things that are both good and bad, and true all at the same time. A great example last week was Tiree itself.
We featured in the press both in relation to the housing crisis and the triumphant return of the Tiree Music Festival.
The Herald covered the fact that around 46% of Tiree’s houses are not permanently lived in, coinciding with the Young Islanders Network (YIN) releasing survey results about housing.
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The Young Islanders Network deputy housing and employment representative is Sapphire Arkless from Tiree, who has lived experience of the very real struggle many have to find homes.
Results suggest that only 17% of respondents across the islands thought there was enough housing in their communities, 65% thought there were too many holiday homes and 47% felt more homes needed to be built.
At the same time, the Tiree Music Festival is celebrating. After dreadful luck last year which resulted in cancellation whilst half the attendees were en route, the sun is shining, the tunes are flowing, and 2000 people are having a ball. That’s definitely a good news story!
Despite the doom and gloom on the housing front, Tiree is full of good news stories. Tiree Surf Club hosted a Junior National Surfing Championship in June, and a leg of the World Windsurfing Championships, the Wave Classic, is held every October.
The island is covered in small businesses doing great things – from beer, whisky and gin to sea tours and from art and jewellery to tea and coffee. We have more food establishments open this year than in living memory and a film festival is planned for September.
Last week, the Trust handed over the keys for a brand new set of business units to four local tenants. They published a youth activities calendar for the summer holidays, offering a whole host of free events for local and visiting children. Tiree has a Sports Day, a thriving Fèis and a very well-attended Agricultural Show. Every year we produce hundreds of well-regarded calves and thousands of lambs while being home to thriving populations of rare orchids, bees and birds.
But also, our population is ageing, our housing market is indeed a hot mess, Gaelic is almost gone, and we’re at the end of the list for fibre to the premises – now delayed by another 12 months.
We’re at the mercy of one old boat a day on average, and the roads will keep you spending on springs. Finding volunteers is an ongoing challenge, and every time we try to address some of the challenges, grown adults descend into a tit-for-tat about their feelings or take their irritation at fuel prices out on the organisation running the service because no-one else will. We are better than that. At least, we should be.
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Across rural Scotland, if we are to start addressing the challenges which face us, we need to put the tech down and realise how we are being pitched against each other. It’s a cliché, but more really does unite us than divide us. To turn things around, we have to be able to talk about the problems.
We have to be able to put our feelings aside, coalesce around the least bad options and work together.
Because at the end of the day, it’s not actually about us. It’s about the generations coming after us, and if they are worried, at age just 13 about housing – and about climate – then we would do well not just to listen to them but to show them by example how working as a team can achieve more than shouting into a digital void ever will.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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