Three weeks ago, I disdained the social networking website Twitter, as I had done ever since I first heard tell of it. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in sensing that all it amounted to was Stephen Fry announcing that he was cutting his toenails in the bath and Victoria Beckham luxuriating in the ability to put 129 exclamation marks behind the words “Bin shoppin”.
Then a friend told me that she had plugged my blog posting about the Alternative Vote. And where had she plugged it? On Twitter. I didn’t think much about it until I detected a striking spike in my blog visitor numbers. I hastened to investigate Twitter. I soon saw that it was for me.
My less dismissive notion of the site before I looked at it was still one that again I suspect that I was not alone in entertaining. People posted comments of up to 140 characters and their followers read them and were duly grateful. I couldn’t imagine that there would be many, the crumbs from whose tables I would be anxious to hoover up. Who would I follow?
On the other hand, I have plenty of practice at the brief, snappy letter to The Guardian and, though those tired of seeing my moniker on the letters page of that paper (and sometimes others) may find it hard to credit, only a portion of the letters I send actually makes it to print. But everything I tweet will survive. Naturally, none of my regular blog readers would dream of musing that perhaps I have occasionally been given to overwriting, that the editor’s blue pencil might sometimes be wanting on my postings. But 140 words is a good length, generous enough to make a succinct point.
I looked at my friend’s tweets. She rarely uses the full 140 characters. She frequently “retweets” the remarks of others and evidently never fails to retweet any compliment she receives. And there are nearly 1,700 fellow tweeters following her, which means that everything she tweets gets deposited in the in-box (called a timeline) of each of those followers, including her retweets and her responses to twitters who have tweeted her. Well, she has a certain public profile. I’m not unduly surprised. It seems quite a lot, though.
I know that Barack Obama tweets – the first head of state, I believe, to do it – so I put him in the search box and there was his timeline. He has nearly 7.5million followers and, more amazingly, he follows nearly 700,000 other tweeters. Of course his tweets are anodyne and you’d think that someone does them for him, save that he’s obviously a congenital fiddler with gadgets and they do sound like him. I bet he doesn’t read the incoming tweets, though. Even if all those he follows only tweet once each day, he wouldn’t be able to read them and govern the country as well.
So, with some slight misgivings, I signed on as a tweeter. It seems there were 200million tweeters worldwide so now there are 200million and one. My misgivings almost entirely concerned the little that I needed yet another displacement activity. Putting those aside, I took to it as a duck to orange. You can say anything you like as long as it isn’t offensively disobliging in the way that people generally understand that to mean – impugning individuals, giving gratuitous offence to groupings, that kind of thing. But no one minds if you say “fuck”.
If you are lucky enough, as I was, to have someone welcoming you in and recommending her followers to have a look at you, you soon have a list of followers of your own. Inside the first day, I had an MP whom I have never met following me. What’s more, she had not been connected to me by my friend. I had started putting people who interested me in the search engine, sampling their timelines and electing to follow those who I thought would not be wasting my time. One of those was that MP. I wondered if she automatically reciprocates by following those who follow her, but no, her following numbers are lower than her follower numbers.
I committed myself to following a select band of public figures whom I like and friends who, as I discovered, already tweet. And I started to frame my own tweets. Long story short, it became my latest obsession. Any damn fool thing that popped into my head became a tweet. In a little over two weeks, I have perpetrated more than 150 tweets. Of course I like to think that some few of them might divert somebody. But in truth few of them have been retweeted yet.
One’s list of followers grows slowly. Some of them are people who can only have fallen in one’s way by chance, people in small-town America with whom one has nothing in common. These seem to be the ones most likely to fall off one’s list pretty soon. But a local newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas is still loyal, to what end I cannot guess. Also I’m touched that a number of Guardian journalists have picked up on me, and the letters page of that paper too.
I have not been promiscuous in my own following. Some tweeters only use their tweets as links to longer information elsewhere so unless you want to follow up these links there’s little point in continuing with them. Some tweet in a style of rambling incoherence. Some only ever appear to be in simultaneous conversation with others and the half of some of the conversations conducted by the person you follow drops onto your timeline but not the other half (you can access the other half if you wish).
I find the best tweeters are those who offer wry, pithy, unexpected and honed observations about the world in general rather than the narrower world in which they sit. Julian Clary was the first tweeter I felt really drawn towards. His one-liners have a delightfully old-fashioned air about them, like a rather camper version of Alan Bennett (who sadly doesn’t tweet; nor does Victoria Wood). I also fell over the humorist David Schneider and soon added him to my list. He tweets perpetually and widely, rather too often to offer links but often enough just for the sake of being witty, which is certainly reason enough for me. One of his was: "Obama announces he will stand for election on the slogan 'Yes We Haven't'".
I did look at the timeline of Stephen Fry’s legendary tweets but he seemed another in perpetual conversation so I didn’t click on his follow button. I confess that I was looking for an excuse not to. But it’s hard to predict which of those you admire will turn out to be ideal tweeters and which hopeless. It’s nifty that each person you elect to follow gets an email to introduce you but, if you decide to stop following, Twitter is discreet about it. I notice that my follower numbers go up and down and I’m convinced that the drop-outs are all strangers but I can’t be sure.
A lot of politics gets aired on Twitter though not of course if you don’t look for it. I’m sure a lot of sport does too but I assiduously avoid it. Many political tweeters exist only to point you towards articles and if you’re not reading them you may as well cull the supplier. I had hopes of Tony Benn but he, like many tweeters, did a couple a while ago and then got sidetracked and forgot about it. Ming Campbell’s tweet list is the same. Busy politicos are apt not to have time to tweet much or their tweets are done for them, like a sort of on-line diary. The most engaging tweeting politician I have so far found is Chris Bryant. He always has plenty to say, obviously gets a kick out of issuing bulletins and smart remarks and, being in opposition and not in the Shadow cabinet, has a bit more leisure for it than, say, Ed Balls.
Of course, at a holiday time like the present, people’s opportunity and appetite for tweeting will be variously compromised. Nobody wants to seem like they’re not out enjoying themselves. My partner and I are fortunate enough to live somewhere where we can have lots of fun and I hope that I have communicated some of that in my more domestic tweets.
But, as may be apparent, I am in the early stages of an infatuation. It will settle, I am sure, especially as I have a slew of work to get stuck into starting this weekend (we freelancers know nothing of bank holidays).
Incidentally, it turned out that the swell of visitors to this blog was not entirely or even especially caused by my friend’s tweet about it. Very curiously, a lot of the visits concerned a posting a fortnight earlier, the one about the nuclear plant damage at Fukushima. By the time that fortnight had passed, a great many internet searchers, especially ones in the far east, were finding their way to my blog and evidently reading or at any rate scanning the piece. This was unexpected, gratifying and rather alarming in the sense that it gave me a grave sense of responsibility for the accuracy and wisdom of what I had written. I hope I survived the scrutiny. Certainly no one is reading my tweets for my views on the advisability or otherwise of nuclear energy.
To access my tweets, click on the Twitter icon above on the right hand side of the page. Oh, and if you scroll down to the very bottom of this page, you'll find my most recent tweets there.
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A note about another site. If you paste this url into your address box:
http://www.storycellaronline.com/
you will find a new and satisfying site called The Story Cellar. You can run around it and explore for free, sampling the very varied short stories that it features. Then, for the modest fee of £15 per year (via PayPal), you can download whichever story catches your eye and follow up with another brand new short story each month. As an introductory bonus, a story from the out-of-copyright past may be chosen too.
Now there are many reasons why this is a beguiling place to go and not only because one of the stories is by moi (did you see that coming?). I shall be submitting others to the site soon and, as you will see, you can too.
Hope it engages you.
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