MY RECENT confident prediction that Twitter would soon go the way of Second Life and the dodo is not, I admit, looking good. On the contrary, the networking site’s starring role in last week’s events will now only increase the pressure to tweet on those who have resisted so far; while recovering tweeters, of which there are many, will be newly tempted to relapse.
Among the latter, I see that Senator Ivana Bacik’s account, dormant since Halloween, has just been reactivated. “The news focus on Dan Boyle’s tweet has reminded me to get active again on Twitter,” she writes. “More to come . . .” Meanwhile, first-time tweeters, some with very high profiles, also continue to emerge.
The most dramatic example so far this week is the Dalai Lama. Although he didn’t cite Dan Boyle as an inspiration, the timing does look suspicious. At any rate, it must be said that Twitter and religious leaders are well suited. As I write, the Dalai Lama has already collected 50,000 “followers”.
Of course, Twitter’s perceived success in the political assassination of Willie O’Dea is an exaggeration. There was also a lot of activity in the “Grassy Knoll” area – if that’s not an unfortunate metaphor for Green Party grassroots – at the time.
And the earlier shot fired by Déirdre de Búrca was still ricocheting dangerously.
Even so, it was Tweedle Dan rather than Tweedle Déirdre who was seen to have made the fatal intervention: giving Twitter its finest hour to date, at least in Ireland. Timing was a lot of it. But the format’s enforced brevity – a quality Senator Boyle does not always achieve in more traditional forms of expression – also added to the effect.
His tweet was dramatic in more ways than one. There was a touch of the theatrical aside about it: almost as if it was meant for the audience's ears only, and not for the other actors on stage. Such a conceit is still just about plausible because Twitter is a relatively new phenomenon. Hence the echoes of Hamlet(no, seriously) in Boyle's expression of doubt about O'Dea.
Hamlet’s first line in the famous play is an aside, disowning the king’s affection for him as “cousin” and “son” with the muttered line: “A little more than kin and less than kind”. Thus the audience is secretly allowed to share his emotion of no confidence in Claudius and knows that there will be, in the words of the now-famous tweet, “a few chapters in this story yet”.
Had Boyle explored his feelings in an interview – with, say, the brilliant Seán O’Rourke – he might have been tempted to describe those chapters in detail, thereby perhaps giving ammunition to the defence. But brevity is the soul of Twitter. So instead, his pithy and eloquent aside was seen to set up the drama and propel it its bloody end.
Eamon Ryan’s speech during the Dáil debate, in which he achieved neither pithiness nor eloquence, was arguably more damaging to O’Dea. So was the minister’s own “I’m a victim” comment, to which O’Rourke reacted as a hungry cat would to a mouse. But the exact sequence of events is already fading. The popular perception will remain that the tweet was the sword O’Dea fell on, however many people were involved in the push.
ON ANalmost completely different subject, mention of Dáil debates and the Dalai Lama takes me back to 1996 when my wife and I went on a delayed honeymoon to India. We visited the usual places there – the Taj Mahal, the Golden Temple of Amritsar, etc. But we also spent a few days in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama fled after the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and where he still lives with 10,000 of his (non-Twitter) followers.
We fled there too, in a sense: albeit only from the heat of Delhi, where we had spent the first days of our trip in culture shock. Some 5,000 feet above sea level, Dharamsala was mercifully cool, with glorious views. And although the Dalai Lama wasn’t home at the time – he was in the US, I think – his Buddhist monks everywhere.
One of my favourite memories of the place was watching the student monks debate every day. They did it in pairs, in a public square: where one debater would sit under each tree and his opponent would stand facing him, while supervisors looked on and made occasional comments.
Naturally, we couldn’t understand a word, but it still was very entertaining to watch. The sitting debater was relatively passive, whereas the person standing was much more forceful: moving back and forward in time with his argument, and clapping hands in triumph when he exposed an error in his opponent’s thinking. There was a lot of laughter too, by everyone involved.
It was the sort of experience that, as a visitor, you wanted to share with your friends: if only to let them know that you were there and they weren’t. But this was pre-Twitter, pre-Internet, and almost pre-mobile phones. It’s amazing to think now: only 14 years ago, and yet it seems like another world.
That said, as I recall, there was a crude social-networking technology then in use, whereby you could compose tweet-style messages, of about 140 characters typically, and send them to family and friends. I only wish I’d saved a few of these museum pieces, to show my disbelieving children. What’s this they were they called again? Oh yes, I remember now. “Postcards”.