UPFRONT:TWITTER? PURLEASE, YOU just have to look at the name. Besides, why would anyone feel the need to broadcast their every movement to the world, and what class of eejit would care? Such were my thoughts when I first got wind of the social networking, micro-blogging, real-time, short-messaging service that is Twitter. See? Even its descriptors are a turn-off. Besides, I social network on Facebook, I, er, macro-blog on my blog, and I message on e-mail or via my mobile phone. Twitter me hoop, thought I, and went about my daily business in a Tweet-free world.
Even against my own colleagues’ better judgment, I held strong. Tweeting sounded like the kind of thing a cartoon character might get up to. I taught I taw a number of reasons why such an activity should be avoided, not least the fact that I already spent far too much time every day checking three e-mail accounts, my Facebook account, my blog comments, other people’s blog comments, while also keeping track of text messages and the more common-or-garden phone call. To add Twitter to this list would require a breach in the space-time continuum that could put the planet in jeopardy.
But then somebody pointed out that there were lots of other feature writers and arts journalists and bloggers establishing names for themselves on Twitter and garnering billions of followers, and suddenly I was all over that site like newsprint on fingertips. There is nothing like professional paranoia to get a body moving. I U-turned, I surrendered, I signed up and signed over, and I emitted my first tweet.
Sure, to the uninitiated, Twitter looks like a complete waste of time, but once you get into it, it’s really just life-enhancing stuff. I am aware that this sounds like the kind of cultish fervour you’d expect from someone who’s been suckered in, but that’s Twitter for you. It kind of sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you think it’s the greatest thing ever invented and anyone who isn’t on it is a loon. It gives you followers, for crying out loud. Dozens, even hundreds of them, if you use it cannily enough. Religions have been started with less.
The truth is, for the first while, I was no messiah. I was just following everyone else, sheepish and unconvinced. Plus, the pressure was on to make pithy observations in 140 characters or less, this being Twitter’s general publishing limit. For some reason, saying anything in less than 140 characters was really hard. And that became annoying, then embarrassing, and finally terrifying: what if Twitter was taking over the world and all future journalism would be in short pithy Twitter posts and I would be doomed forever, trapped being unfunny in 140 characters instead of diluting it over a full page like this?
Two weeks and a measly handful of followers in (mainly my colleagues), I was all for quitting. But then I started paying attention, really putting the time in, and upping my stalking ante, and it turned out the more people I followed, the more interesting things got: this was like ear-wigging on a ginormous scale. Not just earwigging – mindwigging. Twitter is nothing at all to do with birdsounds, you’ll find, but a glimpse into millions of people’s heads, over and over again. And yeah, sometimes that can be a bit dull, with an overemphasis on vacuous celebrities or weather, but it can also be utterly fascinating (as, it turns out, can vacuous celebrities). Plus, it’s all done quickly and briefly, like a machine-gun bam bam bam of human life online, a constant staccato of witterings that amount to millions of tiny telegrams about the human condition. Oh, I know there’s been great play made of how quickly Twitter can disseminate news, and that’s handy, admittedly, but there’s also a lot of good reading in hundreds of haiku-ish observations on life, not to mention plenty of company when you’re trying to avoid writing a column.
Sure, there are downsides to my new Twaddiction. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to read anything more than 140 characters long. Like, who has that kind of attention span these days? It’s all about paring things down to their bare bones, and frankly, if it requires a second tweet, you’ve probably already lost me. Next! Refresh!
Added to this is the fact that Tweeting is suddenly an arrestable offence, at least according to a news story that appeared in this paper last week. That one silenced me for a millisecond. See, I’m the kind of person who always feels guilty, even when I’m pretty sure I’ve done nothing to feel guilty about. I can’t help it: give me an angry-faced editor, and I will assume it’s because my copy has been revealed as riddled with untruths; customs officers make me feel like I might have somehow forgotten about the cocaine I sewed into my knickers. So imagine what the headline “anarchist arrested over Twitter use at G20” did to me? I almost gave myself up there and then. It turns out that the anarchist chap in question is accused of using Twitter to inform protest groups about the movements and whereabouts of the police who were after them. My heart stopped for a beat (a tweeted beat, too), and then restarted as I read on.
The FBI agents who raided his hotel room were looking for more than just a computer and a Twitter log in, the story explained (I removed the chair from the door and began to disassemble the barricades). They also removed anarchist books and pictures of Marx and Lenin. Eep! Now, as a Tweeter with a picture or, worse still, a book of Karl Marx likely to be somewhere in the house, I’m probably on the FBI wishlist. What if they’re following me on Twitter? I do a quick scan. It is unlikely the FBI has taken the alias twentymajor, I figure. I tweet innocuous things about loving freedom and Paris Hilton, just in case. What’s the alternative, after all? Giving up tweeting? No way. I can’t let my followers down.
fionamccann@irishtimes.com