ROLLING with the PUNCHES

In my third month as a Twitter user, I find that I am still feeling my way. It is in many aspects a curious phenomenon, most particularly because one is working in a public forum of unknowable nature and range. Anyone who has ever performed any kind of display in public or service to the public knows of that mysterious hinterland wherein one semi-exists, not discerned by most, but at the same time discerned both by some of the passing traffic and by those arrested by one’s performance or even witnessing it out of a planned intent. On Twitter, one sends remarks – it’s hard to know what else to call public statements of 140 characters or fewer – into a void that may indeed be empty or may be a vast echo chamber.

If echoes bounce back from public display, they may create a heady sense of being – I don’t know – validated, perhaps, or even (hah) important. Many years ago, I was sitting in a tube train in London when I noticed that the man sitting next to me was reading a theatre review that I had written for the monthly magazine Plays & Players. A moment later – and here it leaps into the surreal – I realised that the man sitting opposite me was reading the television section of Time Out, of which section I was at the time editor and hence author of much of it. In my corner seat, I was literally hemmed in by my public. You will be relieved to be assured that I kept my trap shut at this curious coincidence.

On Twitter, your “timeline” – the accumulating thread that logs your own tweets – also shows tweets by those you follow. All of us choose tweeters to follow – “following” – for a variety of reasons. Those who follow us – “followers” – are apt to seem and indeed be random (brought to you by some linking internet device) as well as be on your list because they think you might prove interesting.

Young Master Rooney, before needing the hair transplant he revealed in a tweet

You can tell from the number of tweets overtly or covertly on the subject that something exercising more tweeters than any other matter is the size of their own following. Naturally, public figures attract massive numbers of followers. Footballer Wayne Rooney joined Twitter a couple of weeks after I did and already he has 10,000 followers for every one that I have. That, I’m inclined think, is down to fame rather than literary merit.

Barack Obama is followed by nearly 8.5million, impressively but not too surprisingly. He follows almost 700,000 and you know at once that he can’t personally be looking at his timeline. Even if everyone he follows only tweeted once a week, he could still never read them all. Kevin Spacey is an example of someone who has it right. He has almost 2million followers and he follows just eleven tweeters. That keeps things within bounds. The more people you follow, the more work you give yourself.

And the work varies a lot from tweeter to tweeter. Some joined two or three years ago, posted half a dozen tweets, and then stopped. If they are famous, they may already have wracked up hundreds of followers and those followers have kept following. But of course if the tweeter has nothing to say for two years, the average follower has doubtless forgotten that this star was ever on their following list (you have to call up the list to see who indeed you are following – or who is following you – beyond the most recent handful).

Inevitably, there are some you would gladly follow if only they joined Twitter – in my own case, Alan Bennett, John Berger, Mary Robinson (her Foundation tweets on her behalf), Victoria Wood, John Pilger, Jonathan Miller, Marina Hyde – but you can see only too well why they don’t.

Mutual followers can and do swap remarks, even have extended conversations rather as they do on Google Chat. When you click on the ‘reply’ link on someone’s tweet, the box for your reply has their twitter identity along with an @ symbol. The back-and-forth appears on your respective timelines but not on those of your other followers. You can reply to – that is to say, address a tweet to – someone you follow but who does not reciprocate. However, your tweet will not appear on their timeline. Your tweet may still be seen by them, though, if they click on their own link called ‘@Mentions’: that brings up a list of all tweets containing their ID plus the @ symbol.

Some post their remarks abstemiously. Some – especially journalists, politicians and comedians, in my limited experience – appear to have their tweeting line open all their waking hours. Many of those compulsive tweeters pass on everything that catches their eye, so their tweets are full of links and retweets (repeating the tweets of others) that contain links. This is all very well if you have the time to follow up on all these impulsive heads-ups.

To keep the thing within bounds, I have tried not to be promiscuous in my following. Experience has shown what appeals to me most in using Twitter and it’s predictable enough. It is the reading of – and, whenever possible, the perpetrating of – pithy one-liners, original aperçus and interesting findings. This yields some unpredictable results. For instance, several humorists whose long-form work and appearances in other mediums have never attracted me prove very palatable at 140 characters a time: Steve Martin, Armando Iannucci, Arthur Smith, David Schneider, Albert Brooks, Danny Baker.

Oliver Burkeman, unquiet tweeter

I’ve picked up – and in several cases put down again (“unfollowed” in the jargon) – various contributors to the paper I read most regularly, The Guardian. Of these, Stephen Moss (who tweets as “benonix”) is the one I’m most likely to stick with. He doesn’t overtweet and he doesn’t give me too much extra homework. But he follows six times as many others as I do and I wonder how he finds the time.

One of the wrinkles on Twitter is something called Follow Friday. No doubt simply for the alliteration, this is designated the day for recommending tweeters you follow to people who follow you. The phrase Follow Friday, like any other phrase that recurs in tweets, soon produces a separate thread which one can access by putting Follow Friday in the search box (the place you also go looking for unaccessed tweeters). If a recurring phrase really takes off for a while, it is said to be “trending” and gets added to a trending list.

The hash tag – # – also creates a separate thread so by adding #ff to one’s tweet one immediately throws one’s recommendations into a vast list available to all. Ever out of step, I decided to institute a contrary movement and introduced Forsake Friday, listing those tweeters I propose to unfollow. Last Friday, this got me some trouble.

I had followed for a while one of The Guardian’s correspondents based in the States, Oliver Burkeman. He was often interesting and entertaining but he did seem to pass on to his followers every blessed thing that caught his eye and, when accessing those things means calling up various websites and looking at pictures or reading articles, you do start to flag. I tweeted:

#ForsakeFriday: giving up @oliverburkeman – so many refs and links and conversations equals too much homework; sorry …#ff

To my astonishment, he replied within a couple of minutes:

@WSteG I’m sorry! You must follow some very quiet tweeters if I am among your most prolific!

An indenture to part with Grace

Now, I had once tweeted Mr Burkeman to suggest that he might like to follow me (a bit of a cheek, perhaps, and not one I’ve tried with anyone else) because I thought we had some interests in common. He didn’t rise to that and he never signed up to follow me, so he must have had his mentions thread open when my tweet dropped into it. I wrote back:

@oliverburkeman Well … there are only so many hours in the day.

And that was that. Between these tweets, I posted another tweet:

#ForsakeFriday – also shedding @gracedent – I don’t know what #bgt is, but, from her many, many tweets on it, I sure don’t want to know #ff

Grace Dent also writes in The Guardian. She took over the television column in the paper’s pocket-sized Saturday Guide when Charlie Brooker graduated to fame on the box. What I wrote there wasn’t strictly accurate. I did know that #bgt meant Britain’s Got Talent, a programme that I have never seen (indeed, I watch ITV so rarely that I doubt I have ever even caught a trail for it). As a cultural entity, it is impossible to avoid entirely because newspapers, including The Guardian, run so much stuff about it, stuff that I don’t read but do notice. As for feigning ignorance, playing the faux naïf card is something I have done since childhood and I am aware that it can be (doubtless, usually is) hugely irritating.

It irritated me that Ms Dent tweeted throughout each “bgt” broadcast – evidently nightly – and in a manner that suggested that anyone reading her must be doing the same. I had elected to follow her, rather on a whim, because I fancied that she might be entertaining. But even if she was being entertaining about “bgt”, I didn’t care to know.

Well, she too shot back, just as promptly as Burkeman, “via Osfoora for iPhone” which suggested to me that she tweets on the move:

@WSteG Oh please don’t go. I thought we really had something.

This made me laugh but astonished me. Like Burkeman, she doesn’t follow me. And she has nearly 64,000 followers. Why the hell should she be bothered to reply? I couldn’t resist. Back I shot:

@gracedent Oh, hey, if only you were THAT funny about stuff I understand …

Seconds later came the iPhone reply:

@WSteG are you ok? You seem to be sending shitty messages to a woman you don’t know on the Internet using your real name. Do you mean to?

Being more than 140 characters, this had to extend onto a website for elongated tweets. I was gob-smacked. She seemed to be suggesting that I was the kind of person who writes anonymous hate mail in green ink. Somewhat hysterical, no? I replied:

@gracedent Um … “shitty”? I didn’t know The Guardian was such a protective bubble. Is anonymity required of those who don’t follow bgt?

On reflection, I think I was trying to pack too much meaning into that tweet. She came back, via the web rather than the phone:

@WSteG Stephen. Leave me alone. Polite request.

Evidently this is a novel by Grace Dent, not one I am likely to read

Now, I feel sure that I made some bad misjudgments here. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by the name Twitter, I have been a little inclined to twit people when tweeting them and, especially if they don’t know me, this can come out wrong. No doubt as a result, I felt that this exchange had escalated horribly. Moreover, it seemed gruesomely ironic that an intention to stop following someone ended in them telling you to leave them alone. Well, I passed the rest of the afternoon feeling rather upset and rattled and, after a decent interval, I sent this:

@gracedent Really, really sorry to have given offence. Your column makes me laugh. Best wishes, Steve G

I heard no more. But I was still brooding about it next day. I had put Ms Dent’s name in search and quickly found a tweet that read, in its entirety, “I’d love to punch grace dent in the face”. This was by a woman who used “her real name”. Perhaps Dent had read that before I appeared on her radar and was feeling vulnerable. I looked at her own timeline and found that she had been chirruping away ever since her exchange with me. The only relic of that was her last tweet to me, the “leave me alone” one. I sent her a last message:

@gracedent Of our exchanges yesterday, the only one on your timeline makes me sound like a stalker. Please be kind enough to delete it.

She didn’t, of course. But her timeline lengthens so fast that the tweet she wouldn’t delete is too far down for access now.

Grace Dent, as I say, writes about television. I wasn’t being truthful when I said – trying to be kind – that her column makes me laugh. I’d never read it. So I did read it on Saturday. And that will be my starting point for my next posting …