A playground closed during Melbourne's sixth lockdown (Image: AAP/James Ross)

As lockdowns grow and tighten, each of us is forced to confront something fundamental about just who we are. So — are you a gamer or a shamer?

Do you applaud, facilitate (or just turn a blind eye) to friends, family, neighbours attempting to game the system, to carve themselves out a bit of slack through loopholes to make lockdown a little more bearable? Or are you prim and proper, shaming and blaming, conscious that we’re all just an incautious cough or a poorly worn mask away from disaster? Or worse, a firm talking-to from a premier?

Where the gamer delights in socially distanced pairs and households, strolling from takeaway to takeaway through the narrow streets of Fitzroy or Bondi, the shamer sees a drunken stumble to the hell of community transmission.

Where the gamer smiles at the laughter of children in playgrounds, the shamer scowls at the all-too evident gaseous interchange of airborne particles.

Once, only journalists and media commentators got to play the game. Now — oh! The joys of social media. It’s an open competition. Everyone gets to join in, 280 characters at a time. Problem is, it encourages too many journalists to play it harder.

By now, everyone has collated their experts of choice, stacked up a mental set of anecdotes and data sets to back up their takes. It disrupts all the expected divisions. One minute here’s a Labor-voting Melbourne PhD who somehow comes across a “living with COVID” op-ed in The Australian and shocks themselves with the realisation that they’ve tweeted it out with a fist raised. Next minute, a Barnaby re-Joycer tradie from the bush spots The Age’s live blog of readers dobbing in people breaking lockdown rules, and it’s shared straight to the Facebook group.

Sometimes even the media gets its culture wars confused. The Herald Sun can’t believe it’s luck: a trendy Melbourne pub with a street party ripe for the shaming. Then, wait a minute, here’s Andrew Bolt with a “good on ya” declaration of solidarity — only for the pub’s owners to fracture newfound unity with: “Eh, not us, m8.” (And an appeal to boycott the Herald Sun.)

The smallest of differences between lockdown rules are thrown on top of Twitter hills to die upon. An over-eager reading of the most marginal wriggles in a line graph will get you blocked from Brunswick to Bondi. The war over misleading snaps of beachside promenades spills across the usually genteel frames of Instagram.

Day after day, viewers watch the same press conferences, seeing and hearing something totally different. It’s #DictatorDan; it’s #IstandwithDan. It’s “Gladys will kill us”; it’s “Gladys is the only one who gets it.”

The daily focus on case numbers and rules feeds the angry beast roiling across the country. Australia’s media has learnt precisely the wrong lesson from social media, chasing the sugar hits of disaster to deliver short-term attention highs.

It threatens to fragment trust in each other and trust in governments (at both administrative and political levels). It has contributed to slow vaccine take-up, at least until NSW brought a State of Origin energy to the rollout. 

Distrust and division, once embedded in a society, is hard to dig out. (A recent paper suggests that, even centuries later, the distrust driven by the Spanish Inquisition can explain regions’ diverging economic development.)

In the real world, meanwhile, people are getting on as best they can, trusting their particular state government (or at least its health advisers). Because what else can you do? And amid the numbers, some good news: people are embracing vaccination.

Australia’s media needs to embrace the social capital that is building: put away the hot takes and focus on reporting that helps our communities through to the other side.

Which side of the fence do you sit on? Are rule-breakers going too far, or is the shame game getting out of hand? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.