TOM EATON: Social media has corralled us into tribes of made-up minds

In the final days of December a popular Cape Town radio station embarked on a historic project: it would play the 500 “most iconic songs in history”, counting down until on the first afternoon of the new year it would reveal, I assumed, the most important song of the last 150,000 years.

As the hits rolled past, however, it quickly became clear that we were not going to hear the paeans of the mammoth hunters, or the hymns of the Israelites in Egypt, or the favourite ditties of the Han Dynasty, or even those immense political songs that provided the soundtrack for so many dramatic events of recent history; La Marseillaise or the Internationale or God Save the Queen or Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika...