Look Again

In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a big hullabaloo brewing in the last few days in the British media concerning twitter. A few days ago they were excitedly reporting on how trending topics on twitter were forcing traditional media organisations to back down and apologise for offensive articles. Today, the big focus is on Stephen Fry, whose little spat with another user (who has been on the receiving end of some ignorant abuse since) has provoked much chin stroking about whether twitter is ‘finished’

To my mind, the way in which twitter has been presented to the public via the traditional media is wrong. (Nothing new here: if you go back to 1993, the world wide web was sold to newspaper readers as a geeks paradise, of no possible use to normal people.) Twitter was described as a great way to follow what your favourite celebrities were up to. And its biggest problem was when ordinary people tweeted boring things about breakfast, which no-one wanted to know about, and which displayed a startling narcissism on the part of the ordinary person.

To my mind, the problem twitter has, at least with the way it is perceived, is the other way around.

Firstly, ‘boring, irrelevant’ tweets are only as meaningless as their intended audience thinks they are. If a friend tweets ‘Just had a great cup of coffee’, I don’t find that boring. Its exactly the kind of thing people say to each other. If it was said in a restaurant, would it be appropriate for someone at an adjoining table to loudly claim it was a boring and irrelevant remark? People have conversations in public: deal with it. If you find eavesdropping boring, stop listening.

The more close a relationship, the more boring and irrelevant the conversations will seem to an outsider, but if we only spoke to our friends about ‘important’ matters, we wouldn’t have many friends.

Secondly, the tendency to see twitter as a means of getting close to celebrities is like saying that computer screens are a great way of illuminating a room. Partially true, but understates the potential rather.

I used to follow some celebrities, but quickly found that doing so inhibited my tweeting. I didn’t find Stephen Fry boring, but I felt ridiculous tweeting about my thoughts when such a celebrated wit was tweeting a few lines above me. But, to my friends, my tweets were just as relevant. And I enjoyed the democratising effect of twitter: all tweets are equal.

The potential of twitter is that we can all say what we think. But if we don’t think – and instead, just get told what to think – then twitter turns into a great way to mobilise mobs. And the fault is not with Stephen Fry – we are all allowed to snap at people from time to time – but with us. Its looking a bit like that scene in The Life of Brian, when he begs us to realise that we are all individuals. “Yes, we are all individuals” we chant back.