Barely two weeks ago I was one of probably very many people who thought that the No camp would likely win the referendum. I had pored over the polls, and I had also followed with considerable zeal the constant stream of online comments, posts, and blogs.

I had no doubt that hunters and their kin would vote Yes. But that was to be expected. They made up a restricted circle of people for whom hunting is a good part of what makes life worth living. Their votes would stack up, to be sure, but not enough to rewrite a foregone conclusion.

That was until the Friday night before the referendum, when I met two people who were neither hunters themselves nor related in any way to hunters. They told me that they found it unfair that a group of people should be denied their pastime. They had made up their minds to vote Yes.

The next morning I met another two people who were on their way to do the same. None of them cared very much about hunting or birds. Only they had friends who did, and who had implored them to vote Yes as a kind of friendly gesture.

Which is how it dawned on me how wrong I’d been. Even though four people is hardly the most representative of random samples, I realised there were probably many more out there who shared their rationale.

When I saw the voter turnout figures later that day, I wasn’t surprised. The clue is in the words ‘out there’.

­­Two people (who are not hunters) told me they found it unfair that a group of people should be denied their pastime

The problem was that I had spent too much time online and especially in the social networking bazaars. Had I got out a bit more, I would probably have noticed that the hunters had stronger support on the ground than was evident among the thickets of Facebook posts.

What follows is not about hunting. Rather, I would like to argue that the social media can be very misleading indeed. That’s because while they masquerade as technologies that open up new vistas, they often end up doing exactly the opposite.

Nobody who has read anything or thought about the matter will find this too astonishing. Early understandings of the internet tended to be starry-eyed. They dreamt up a world in which place no longer mattered. There would no longer be any difference between world and local affairs, and people would indulge in a kind of universal informational promiscuity.

Instead what we’ve ended up with is a bunch of fairly closed circles in which we spend our days looping the loop and narrowing our minds. The news webpages and things like You Tube are liberating enough. It’s the social networking sites that are so damningly limiting.

These days, when I feel like reading something new and exciting, I pick up a book or a magazine. When I feel like hearing a different opinion, I go down to the shops. Strange that my small library and a couple of magazine subscriptions should come up with more surprises than ‘the world at the click of a mouse’, or that my local grocers should produce more diversity than a global network. But that’s exactly how it works.

There are two things about the social media that make them so predictable and limiting.

First, not everyone is online; and, of those who are, not all are into the social media. Those of us who inhabit circles in which pretty much everyone is ‘on Facebook’ would do well to remind ourselves that there are whole swathes of people who couldn’t care less.

Second, even within the limited world of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, networks are curated (both intentionally and willy-nilly) according to criteria that further restrict the social spread that any one individual finds themself in. Which is why lists of ‘mutual friends’, for example, tend to be rather long.

Take me and hunting. My line of work means that I am acquainted with very many hunters. In some cases these acquaintances have become genuine friendships based on mutual trust. I also know – and I don’t think I’m unique in this – many people whose backgrounds incline them to be sympathetic to hunters.

And yet my list of Facebook friends (I converted to the religion in 2014) reads like a who’s who of environmentalists and people who think that hunters are a collective avatar of Satan. The only activist I can think of who is not my friend is Saviour Balzan. I doubt he loses sleep over it, and neither do I.

I couldn’t explain this exclusivity if my life depended on it. I have never consciously sought to limit my online networks. My list of Facebook friends does, in fact, include some hunters, but only very, very few. Somehow, and much as I dislike it, I found myself in this sorry state of affairs.

One might argue that there is nothing about the social media that makes them any different from face-to-face networks. Online or not, people will move around in social circles. Still, there is something about spending time in a bar or queueing behind a line of people at an ironmongery that makes these two activities more socially promiscuous than a week spent online. Hard though it might be to put one’s finger on it, that’s how it works.

My Facebook tells me that about 90 per cent of the Maltese population think that hunters are incorrigible brutes, and that the Prime Minister should close the hunting season at the first whiff of a cuckoo in disguise. Nothing that a quick trip down to my greengrocers won’t remedy.

mafalzon@hotmail.com