Luke Palmer on Keeping Safe Online [Grow Blog Tour]

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Grow by Luke Palmer

A white supremacist group and its violent leader targets teenage Josh, who is struggling to cope with his father’s recent death at the hands of terrorists. Will he find the strength to resist, or will his unlikely relationship with Dana give them both the escape that they so badly need?

An unflinching and muscular exploration of grief, and what we plant in the spaces that loss leaves inside us, Grow is a tense and compelling novel of our current social landscape.

Keeping Safe Online

Guest Post by Luke Palmer

We’ve all seen the memes about arguing online, right? We all know it’s a bad idea, a fruitless endeavour, that the limited rhetorical space of social media is not designed for the nuanced and delicate expression of finely wrought ideas to even state a position, let alone argue against one. And heaven help you if you try to change your opinion. On anything. Ever.

But when that post pops up on your timeline, it’s hard to shift that feeling; your uniquely-observed, pithy one-liner cannot possibly fail to put that particular poster in their place, reducing their misguided argument to rubble whilst garnering a whole host of likes for yourself. And you’ve managed to spot a grammatical error in their profile, too? This is going to feel so good! And what could possibly go wrong?! 

There are many articles and studies into the addictive nature of social media. And whilst it’s true that social media is not the whole internet, over 80% of the world’s 4.5 billion internet users are on one or more social media platforms, so it accounts for much of our experiences of the online world. But we’ve known for years that addiction is literally designed into these apps and platforms. It’s not news.  

What we talk about less, perhaps, is the way in which the emotions that the internet creates are also highly addictive. In Grow, the narrator, Josh, gets very quickly sucked into the online world of far-right terrorism. It’s not because this particular white supremacist group have employed infinite scroll or have become masters of behavioural design. It’s about something much simpler than that. It’s about anger. 

Josh is angry. And he has a very good reason to be. He spends a long time after the death of his father staying away from that anger. But the insidious influences in the book tap into that rage, and Josh gets hooked on it. Anger is a dangerous thing, and perhaps the oldest weapon in the human arsenal, feeding the unevolved beast of our primordial limbic system. Anger rewards us with a heady shot of adrenaline; a dopamine rush that can become addictive in itself. It’s not long before Josh needs to keep his anger fed just to get him through the days, the white-hot fire in his stomach demands constant fuel. Soon, Josh’s anger has become weaponised and he finds himself in a dangerous place, with no apparent way out.

We seem to be living through times where it’s possible to feel angry about anything, most of the time. In a world where opinions are more vociferously argued than ever, anger becomes a kind of currency. As people move away from traditional news outlets in favour of social media, despite its historic relationship with ‘truth’, even they seem to be increasingly resorting to click-bate tactics and emotive headline grabbing. It seems now that ‘if it seethes, it leads’. And in the murky and piranha infested waters of far-right ‘news’ outlets online, which I had to wade into when researching Grow, the anger-factor is dialled right up to 11.

Online advice is still very important and should continue to be taught widely, but staying safe in the digital environment means more than the standard protocol of managing your personal details and being careful who you’re talking to. It means managing and staying aware of your emotions and how they are being manipulated by the content in front of us. It’s a difficult and potentially dangerous space. 

I often think we’d all be much better off doing some gardening instead. Or – gasp – perhaps reading a book. Maybe you’d like to read mine.

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Thank you, Luke!

Thanks so much to Luke for writing such a great guest post. I’ve recently started working in a school and I’ve learned a lot about online safety, as well as safeguarding students who could potentially be drawn into terrorism, so this post and Luke’s book Grow came at a perfect time.

If you’re interested in reading Grow, you can get your copy right now! Fun fact: I actually hosted the book launch for Grow and had a wonderful time chatting with Luke about the book and his writing. I’ll be uploading the full event on my YouTube channel soon, so I’ll come back and add it here as soon as I do!

You can click the links at the top of this post to get your copy of Grow right now!