BITER BIT

I no longer tweet. If you’d told me first thing yesterday that by the end of the day I would have cancelled my Twitter account (as it’s called – in fact no money changes hands), I would have been very surprised. But there it is.

Maybe I was subconsciously ready to give it up. There is a certain justice in the prejudice among Twitter atheists that tweets are largely of the “just-eating-a-cress-sandwich-and-cutting-my-toenails” variety. Tweeters – and I cannot in conscience exclude myself – do abide by the notion that there is abiding interest in what they happen to be doing, purely because they happen to be doing it. Of course this can go to ludicrous extremes. Why should anyone give a flying fuck if some bozo in Arkansas is watching reruns of CSI:NY series two (whatever the hell that is)? And such banality gets designated a “top tweet” (according to some flummery about algorhythms) while your original, witty and grammatical bon mot on this or any other subject is listed under the hashtag system as an also-ran. If the bozo just added “and I’m HATING it”, at least there would be a frisson of novelty about his comment.

Then there are the huge numbers of tweeters who ‘retweet’ (i.e. reproduce) for the benefit of their ‘followers’ (those who choose to read their tweets regularly) all the complimentary tweets that they receive. This seems to me to be a definition of bad form. The only person who is obliged to endure your pleasure in people saying nice things about you is your mother or, at a pinch, your partner; and if you have neither, you should – as tweeters are apt to say – STFU (I do not propose to translate that piece of internet lingo). I would no more retweet somebody else’s admiration of me than I would post a nude photograph of myself (something that millions of internet users indeed do).

And of course there’s a lot of nasty and boring stuff on Twitter. Even tweeters capable of wit, perception and pith see no cruelty in inflicting on their followers a regular running commentary on some jackass television programme or some dreary sports event that most of us go onto Twitter precisely to avoid.

But the biggest disappointment about Twitter concerns the difficulty in engaging interesting and/or important matters in 140-character bites. Because of this, I have found some discomfort with that ingredient that has always been the most elusive and fraught in internet and other instant dealings (emails, texting, messages on website forms): to wit, tone. I think a lot of people have difficulty with this, not just me. It’s one of the reasons why some professional commentators get to be so disliked and resented.

And it was the business of tone that drove me from Twitter. Here’s how it played out. I was introduced to the site by an old chum who thought it would suit me. She also recommended that I and a journalist friend of hers follow each other because she thought we might hit it off. Given this matchmaking role that she played, I will call her Dolly Levi. And the journalist had better be William Boot.

Now Boot and I do have a certain amount of attitude in common, I think. But we fiercely disagree about one matter. I think Ed Miliband is a smart and competent leader of the Labour Party who deserves to be supported and encouraged. He thinks Miliband is a dead loss. And he has the advantage that, as a journalist with a regular outlet, he can say so to a fairly substantial readership.

Last week, Boot paid his first visit to a Labour Party conference and wrote a big colour piece for his paper. I told him afterwards that I found it disappointing – I have sent him admiring messages about good pieces – but candidly I thought it was a dreadful piece. “Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman and four unknowns sidle on to the stage and sit behind a large desk, looking like a quiz team”. Well, Boot, just because four people are unknown to you, the conference virgin, it doesn’t mean that the hall was full of people whispering to each other “who are they?” What a lofty, mean-spirited, snide little crack.

The whole article is in that vein, scoring piffling points off the conference and its participants with pawky jokes and belittling slights. But of course this is merely reflecting the zeitgeist. In celebrity culture, everyone is fabulous and awesome and visionary and a genius and no one in public life has less than a fawning word about anyone else in public life. Perhaps to counteract this, politicians are universally considered fair game for the most disobliging comments, no matter how wounding or unjust. Otherwise impeccably enlightened people who deplore the kind of scorn that Tories hand out to, say, John Prescott for his gamely admitted eating disorder, see no contradiction in mocking Eric Pickles for his girth. The subtext is easily readable: politicians are beneath respect or compassion.

On Saturday, Boot tweeted a few summary notions about his adventures among the politicians, including repeating something he’d been told by a “top shadow cabinet person”. I tweeted a reply: “You journos: WHICH “top shadow cabinet person”? How can we know that you didn’t make it up. Journos are less to be trusted than politicos”. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I wrote but having quit Twitter I now have no record of it. Boot sent three replies to this in four minutes and I have their texts because they come as email: “I am very tempted to unfollow you for that insult. I probably will actually. I don’t make things up”. Then: “It is perfectly legitimate to protect the anonymity of sources in circumstances where they would be compromised”. Then: “I’ve unfollowed you for a Tevez-like cooling off period. (Tevez is a footballer BTW)”.

The last bit in parentheses refers to his knowledge of my uninterest in football. In fact, like Mary in The Pickwick Papers, I affect not to know as much as I do for I have read about the Manchester City business and know that Carlos Tevez has won himself less than golden opinions there lately (I have no idea which team BTW is, however).

I had genuinely thought that my original tweet was jocular in tone, perhaps veering towards a touch more asperity in the concluding sentence. But I was forgetting that you twit journalists at your peril. Like critics, they can hand it out but they can’t take it. Boot wouldn’t think twice about remarking that politicians “make things up” but the suggestion that he might do so is a red rag to a bull.

Now, this little spat speaks to a problem that I have had with political coverage for years. It is the whole notion of stuff that is “off the record”. You know the sort of thing: “a minister told me unattributably”, “sources say”, “party officials are indicating privately”. Bunkum, I say. In which alternative universe do people speak “privately” to a journalist?

Boot declares grandly that he had to “protect the anonymity” of his source, but did he give two minutes of thought to why he was told what he was told? This kind of shabby exchange short-changes those who read the result on two levels. First, we are expected to take what the journalist/reporter claims at full face value. So let’s examine Boot’s claim. The phrase he deployed was “top shadow cabinet person”. Now, the three “top” cabinet jobs are traditionally considered to be Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, so Boot’s source was either Ed Balls or Douglas Alexander or Yvette Cooper. If none of these was his source, he was aggrandising his contact, one must assume, to make himself seem more important.

Inevitably, given the space constraints, Boot didn’t quote Alexander or Mr or Mrs Balls directly so we next are obliged to assume that he summarised what they said accurately and gave due weight to the element of what they told him “anonymously” that he alluded to. That’s quite a skill but of course journalists have to do that all the time, even Johann Hari.

But why does Boot think Yvette or Ed or Douglas gave this nugget to him, rather than to Nick Robinson or Michael White or Adam Boulton? He’s a neophyte doing a colour piece. Given that he has this little scoop, the temptation must be to make more of it than it merits – although here Boot, negligently, seems to have omitted to drop the nugget into his article. You worry that he’ll never be entrusted with a private word again.

Journalists are indeed human (boy, are they human) and the ambitious journo (among whose numbers I guess Boot doesn’t really figure) will perfectly understandably – if unforgivably – run with his exclusive nugget, project it beyond its merit, juice it up to make it more saleable and, at a pinch, invent it. Oh yes. Do not believe that you have never heard a sentence beginning “government sources tell me” that didn’t end in an utter fabrication.

Second level: what is the game of the politico? Is she flying a kite, chucking a phial of black propaganda into the pond, whistle-blowing a resented colleague? Does Boot know what he is doing, what game he is being roped into, when he repeats something told to him under conditions of anonymity? These are dark arts, my old friend, and you mix with them at your peril.

At any rate, Boot clambered perilously onto his high horse and struck me off his Twitter thread. At first I laughed and sent Dolly Levi a message, asking her to ask Boot whether I was to be Roberto Mancini and he Carlos Tevez or vice versa. Dolly wasn’t playing that game, however. She came back with this: “I think it would be wisest if you had your own cooling off period while you try to develop a less confrontational tweeting style”. Ouch!

I sent a direct message via Twitter back to Dolly. I no longer have the text but I believe I noted that I felt some tweeters were too sensitive and that I had been called on Twitter a moron lately but had rolled with the punch. Dolly knew that I had been called this: it was she who wrote it. But she was up for a scrap: “The persistent dig dig dig of so many of your tweets get people’s backs up. It comes across as rude, especially to strangers”.

I thought this was perfectly outrageous. How can she know how other people feel? Has she commissioned YouGov to conduct a poll of strangers to discover how they react to my tweets? I quickly replied that I didn’t recognise the “persistent dig dig dig” she described. What does she mean? I certainly sometimes twit fellow tweeters – it seems appropriate on a medium called Twitter – but I don’t do it with malice. Has she had the kind of hate mail that I received when I had the temerity to defend Kenneth Clarke against angry tweeters who patently hadn’t troubled to listen to his radio interview about rape sentencing? Is she living in the same world as me?

After brooding on this for some time, I decided that life was too short to be bothered with such nonsense. I untangled myself from Twitter and realised that it felt like a liberation. David my partner pointed out that one off the list of displacement activities was no bad thing,

I emailed Dolly: “I am mortified to think that people who don’t know me have complained to you about my tweeting style. That this might in some way redound on you, as the person who introduced me to Twitter, only makes matters worse. I offer you my apologies and to all those whom I have unwittingly offended. Clearly, I am not cut out for social networking. Accordingly, I have terminated my Twitter account”. Shrewdly if brutally, her response did not give me the satisfaction of seeing her rise to it: “Probably for the best”.

What Dolly and Boot don’t know is that there are some few followers of my tweets – none of them self-important writers and journalists – who regret my retirement, who have found my aperçus and departures from conventional wisdom bracing and provocative in a good way. I am in fact a loss to Twitter. I’m not at all sure that Dolly’s former friendship and Boot’s potential comradeship are any kind of a loss to me.

SEPARATING the TWEET from the CHAFF

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.

************************************************************

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.