Thursday 20 August 2009

Into the Twitter trenches, redux


Posted by Tania Kindersley.


Dear old Janet Street Porter has leapt onto the creaking Twitter-is-crap bandwagon, just before it disappears out of sight down a dusty road. Her piece is so silly that at first I did not think it worth writing about. I wanted to write about the cricket, or the recession, or the simple beauty of a perfect loaf of soda bread instead. But the little Twitter worm has been twitching away in my brain since Sunday, and so I must rush into the breach or I shall develop an irrevocable nervous tic.

Here is what Janet says: ‘anyone who suffers from the desire to communicate exactly what they are doing and thinking every moment of the day in fewer than 140 characters is best described as a twat’. Delighted by this opening salvo, she goes on to trot out the exact same exhausted arguments that all anti-Twitter columnists so adore: it is mindless, it is narcissistic, it is banal. She takes a dangerous swipe at ‘techno bore’ Stephen Fry, which is just asking for it. If Stephen Fry is a bore, then Janet Street Porter is Dull McDull of the Clan Mogadon. She is furious that proper reviews by proper reviewers are being replaced by one line tweets about cultural events, or that proper conversation is reduced to ‘knee-jerk reactions’. I am frankly amazed that she does not insist that the entire world is going to the dogs.

This is so staggeringly stupid that it almost does not merit a reply. I shall give one anyway, with a weary, patient nod of my head. The first and most obvious point is that no one, not even the most crazed, self-absorbed, absolutely-nothing-else-to-do Twitter users communicate exactly what they are doing at every moment of every day. To say so is just babyish and wrong and asinine. It also betrays a crashing ignorance of the nature of Twitter, which leads to the observation that it is slightly odd to mount a scathing assault on something of which you know so very little. But the more important point, the one that none of the Twitter bashers seem to understand, is that Twitter is not replacing anything. The idea that once you start tweeting you may never again have an interesting conversation or a complex opinion or a deep thought about the human condition is blatantly incorrect. People who use Twitter also read broadsheets and follow politics and have intricate jobs and fascinating friends and rich lives. It is not, as the business people like to say, a zero sum game. There is also this excessively curious idea that no one in real life is ever mindless, or banal, or narcissistic. No, no, it is only on the evil, soul-sucking Twitter that solipsism comes out and does the fandango. Has Janet never been cornered by the pub bore? She has spent her life in London media circles, where there are certain people who make a life’s work of the narcissistic. Do I really have to say again that Twitter is an exact mirror of life, where there are the bores and the non-bores, the generous and the mean, the self-promoters and the self-deprecators, the quirky and the pedestrian? Does she think the power of Twitter is so great that the moment it catches you in its drooling jaws it replaces your brain with a suppurating mass of green gloop? She starts to sound like those Area 51 enthusiasts who believe that half the population of Nevada has been kidnapped by space aliens and replaced by a pod.

The other oddity is that every exponent of the Twitter-is-your-very-own-secret-satan school misses the glaringly obvious aspect of the whole enterprise. Twitter is a finely honed Darwinian tool. It is absolutely survival of the fittest. If you are banal and mindless and narcissistic, no one will follow you. Janet need not worry; the dullards may tweet to their heart’s content about their bagels and their office chairs and what they ate for breakfast, but only one man and dog will read them, and the dog will almost certainly be doing so by mistake. Bores are ruthlessly cut. Ironically, this is much easier on Twitter than in life. At a cocktail party, you have to make up some convoluted excuse about seeing your second cousin twice removed across the crowded room; in Twitter, you merely press a button, with no need for mendacity or bad manners. If it is mediocrity that Janet hates so, she should be celebrating Twitter: it is a harmless outlet for the solipsists. They may warble away into the empty ether without bothering anyone. A possible unintended consequence is that, having got their quotidian concerns off their chests online, they may be less inclined to corner strangers at the bus stop to bang on about subjects of no possible interest. Twitter may, in fact, be saving us from the bores.

In every era, in every corner of society, there have always been exhibitionists. Look at me, look at me, see what I am doing; let me tell you what I think, look at my interesting hat, see how I can tap dance. They have found any possible outlet for their cherished self-expression – the stage, a public square, a newspaper, a sandwich board. As a writer, I have to admit myself to their number. (When I was small, I was told often to stop showing off; ‘oh do pipe down,’ my exasperated grandmother once told me as I rattled on and on about something which could only interest my six year old self.) When asked, which is not very often, I give interviews, I have my photograph taken, I go on the wireless to offer my view of the world. (My proudest moment is when I used the word ‘anal’ on Woman’s Hour. Jenni Murray very bravely took it on the chin. She was asking me about pornography, after all.) What is interesting about my own experience of Twitter is I find it has a chilling effect on my dangerous tendencies to egotism. I purposely do not talk about my latest book or my newest blog post or any kind review that has come my way. I quite often do not talk at all about what I am doing, instead tweeting about something out in the world that has caught my interest, and might be of interest to others. I try very hard to be either amusing or informative or slightly left-field. I do not always succeed, but the attempt is there. I am not certain where this imperative comes from. I have the same feeling that I have about this blog: I am communicating to complete strangers, who guard their precious time; if I am asking them to give me a moment out of their life, I had better give them something good in return.

Twitter is a series of bulletins from an astonishing variety of lives. It does not stand in for life, but is a cherry on the cake of existence. It is a little like the old traditions of sending postcards or telegrams, two great British habits. In my Twitter feed I get blasts from foodies, politicos, mothers, feminists, broadcasters, The Young People, activists, dog lovers, charity workers and the Mayor of London himself. I am in communication with people from America, Rome, New Zealand, Iran, Belgium and Canada, as if I have finally achieved my adolescent dream of being a citizen of the world. My months on Twitter have educated me about things I knew nothing about: the poet Frank O’Hara, the dusty towns of Sicily, ballroom dancing in Pakistan in the 1960s, the streets of Tehran, the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey. The nature of Twitter means that you do not get much detail, but your interest is piqued, and you may then roam across the wide prairies of the interweb until you are educated in any novel area you may wish to explore. Twitter is not War and Peace, nor was it meant to be. But all human life is there, and to knock it for its limitations is as vacuous as saying that a haiku is a travesty of poetry. There is value in brevity; pithy is not pathetic. Do I really have to write this all over again? Is it not time that the droning critics got onto their banality ponies and galloped off into the sunset?



Postscript: should you by any chance have missed the previous Twitter rants, and have a masochistic desire to catch up on my Tweetish despatches from the front line, here they all are. (Amazingly many; I am starting to think the nice people at Twitter should be sending me a fat cheque for services rendered.)

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-random-thoughts-from-broad.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-random-thoughts-on-twitter-young.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-thoughts-on-twitter-force-for-good.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-which-i-get-rather-cross-or-people.html

All right, that's quite enough narcissistic self-promotion for one day. Now I must go to Twitter and tweet about how fabulous and fascinating I am....

17 comments:

  1. One of the things that interests me about twitter is this: you occasionally meet someone through it (or through the blogosphere) who you really like. Then you end up DMing them and then you need more characters so you exchange e-mail addresses...and finally you are back at square one, the old-school e-mail address. If I had the time to meet some of the people I've met through Twitter, I would. As you say, it's just another platform.

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  2. Janet Street-Porter accusing someone ELSE of being self-obsessed? Perhaps she's just miffed she didn't jump on the bandwagon early enough?

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  3. Cassandra - so agree. This is why I am at a loss to explain all the fuss. Why is Twitter so very scary to these cross people?

    Lucy Fishwife - I KNOW. Did you not think me restrained not to point that out?

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  4. Janet Strewth-Potty as Dull McDull of the Clan Mogadon - that alone has made my day, and a pretty hairy day it's been, too, with my husband's job almost getting axed this morning.

    Bravo for writing this wonderful defence of Twitter! I've discovered many kind, interesting and funny eggs there. The kind of people I would never have met, living as I do in the wilds of Belgium. Just as you say, there are dreadful bores on Twitter as well, but no one pays them any mind and they eventually fade into oblivion. Mercifully, their tedium is limited to 140 characters, unlike someone who's given many column inches in The Independent for hers.

    Thank you for telling it like it is. You're a tonic!

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  5. You ARE fabulous & fascinating & I have just told everyone that on Twitter. I am thinking of printing off your Twitter pieces, laminating them and handing them out at supper parties etc.

    God it's been boring this past week trying to defend Twitter to people who just don't get it. What they really want to do is lay into me for being self-obsessed. Which is amusing, considering what these people love MOST OF ALL is the sounds of their own voices laying into me.

    If I had to sit next to one more crusty country solicitor hurumphin through his moustaches at me. Bloody mother for inflicitng them on me,

    Rant over LLGxx

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  6. Well I for one wish you WOULD let your Twitter followers know you had a new post, because you write so well! And I agree absolutely about Twitter. It took me a long time to sign up, thinking it was somewhat pointless. But I have 'met' some wonderful people, whose wit frequently makes me laugh out loud, think, question, commiserate, investigate - even cry, occasionally. Anyone I don't enjoy following, I remove. Likewise, anyone who seems quite as full of themselves as JS-P gets virtual short shrift. That is, as you rightly say, the joy of it - the ability to pick the people who come into your life. I deliberately don't follow that many people or indeed get offended if others choose not to follow me. I choose those I follow like I would friends - people who bring something positive to my life. And goodness me, they do!

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  7. Twitter has given me a completely new window on life. When people ask me how I can be so juvenile as to use ‘that internet thing’ I just smile and let them go on. It's they who are missing out.

    Your rant made me laugh out loud, great post.

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  8. Megatonlove - how very kind you are. A tonic is such a lovely thing to be, especially since half the time I feel I don't quite know WHAT I am doing. Hope your husband survives in his job.

    LLG - Ah, you are such a lovely boost to the self-esteem. Can't bear that you have been exposed to the old buffers. Do they start sentences with 'In MY day'? Sending deepest sympathy.

    Sam - thank you so very much. I was exactly the same as you with Twitter; could not quite see point, then got it, now very fond of it. Don't quite get the thing of racking up masses of followers and followees, because I like the good chat, although I know for some people size is everything.

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  9. I'm in danger of posting same comment twice but rather than risk it not going on - here I go again :)

    Hear Hear! *stands to applaud*

    Completely agree with all your well defended points Tania. Especially Citzens of the World comment.

    I've been housebound for health reasons recently and Twitter has given me an amazing amount of company, laughs, food for thought and support. Not bad for a 140 character application!

    Its also opened up the world of blogging and research. Vive la difference I say.

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  10. Hooray and hear hear! As @Glinner (aka Graham Linehan) has written, J S-P has simply embarrassed herself. http://post.ly/2RKr

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  11. Helena - thank you. Think the smile and let it go strategy is excellent, rather than my own grind teeth and shout.

    Lachatnoir - how kind you are. And so agree about the opening of new horizons. Rather than, say, closing one's mind, which some of the critics seem prone to.

    Margaret - I love the glinner post. It's the IGNORANCE which makes me so cross.

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  12. I note that dear old Stephen Fry - who is the most frustratingly infrequent blogger - actually took the time to blog about this issue in his usual succinct and pithy way. I believe he summed it up as 'bollocky bollocks to the lot of them.' Even as an non-tweeter (although a pro-follower) I tend to agree.

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  13. Presumably nobody was holding a gun to JSP's head forcing her to read endless Twitter streams? Any excuse, however feeble, to have a whinge. Poor cow.

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  14. My love - just linked this post to one I have finally written about Twitter. Couldn't agree more. You're just brilliant all the time. xx

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  15. I think, like LLG I need to print this off too.
    So well put....again. And thank you.
    I also would rather like it if you did tell us about a new blog post! I haven't worked out how to subscribe or whatever, you really would be doing us all a favour.

    Like you say it's not replacing anything, and it actually helps sustain friendships and allow group conversations without the impossibility of all being in the same place for these terribly important face to face meetings people keep banging on about.

    You are such a wonderful voice of reason, don't ever stop.

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  16. What a wonderfully well written piece. Engaging, entertaining, eloquent and very amusing.
    I followed a link to this post from twitter...delighted to have made yet another great discovery!

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  17. fantastic, almost tempts me to be a twitterer, except it seems too similar to facebook status updates to bother.
    JSP does seem very impatient and scathing about most things

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