Tag Archives: Twitter

The outing

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Today was a funny day. I went to Bristol to meet two women I’d ‘met’ through Twitter, Alexa and Kate, to visit a social enterprise scheme called Props.  It was hilarious meeting people through Twitter. Eh, who? What? Where?

I chuckled as I walked through the ticket barrier at Bristol Temple Meads, wondering whether I’d actually meet them. Especially as I had in mind we were meeting at Bristol Parkway which is so much smaller.  But there they were. Freezing and big smiles. Kind of recognisable through avatars and the odd tweeted photo.

By the time we were sort of (but not really) lost looking for the Props base somewhere in Bristol, I felt I’d known them both for years. We laughed. And connected tweet snippets from past months with shortcuts forged by the experience of having less than straightforward kids. Loveliness.

But the outing was about Props. And Dave and his crew delivered. Big time. Basically it’s a space for disabled young people to learn, work and flourish. As part of the community with a strong commercial focus. We hung out with Matthew and Jethro. Matthew was hugely impressive. He worked his socks off in an understated way. Making drinks, tidying up, keeping an eye on Jethro’s work, and demonstrating a sophisticated engagement with the tasks involved in print room work. Jethro added the comedic dimension to the visit, with hilarious one-liners and an easy engagement with everyone that I would love a dose of. They both shone.

And made us some great t-shirts.

ryan5-56

ryan5-55

ryan5-54

Wowsers, I hear you say. Social services must be chucking money at this organisation.

Of course they ain’t.

Revisiting tits and trolls

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A rare post about twitter. Sorry twitter haters. A while ago I wrote a pithy little number called ‘Of tits and trolls’.  Now, after getting the latest Moran storm tweeted into my timeline over the past 24 hours, I’m rethinking my support of the ‘block’ button. Basically Moran wrote a column about equality which started with a parody which was the only bit available to view online for non-subscribers of the Times. This caused offence. Moran has a bit of history of causing offence [sive].

Helen Lewis then wrote a laboriously detailed defence of Moran putting ‘everything’ in context. This has been retweeted off the planet. The trouble is, the context that Lewis draws on is sterile and stripped of the emotion, pain, devastation, weariness, tedium, injustice, discrimination, harm, exhaustion, etc, etc, etc, often experienced by the people who are so incensed by Moran’s careless journalism. For me, Lewis’s post reinforces some of the complacency and ignorance that tinges the writing of many journalists (not all of course) who have little or no understanding of what it is like to grow up outside of, or on the margins, of mainstream life.

Should Moran have some sort of insight or understanding of these experiences? I think she probably should given her position and reach. She’s in a position to make a difference. But there’s the block button. That protects Moran (and others) from having to engage with
difference. Well the block button and the concept of ‘troll’.  The trouble is, blocking ‘trolls’ (i.e., people who disagree with you) will lead to twitter becoming a tedious, turgid space where you’re surrounded by similar others, with your views and values protected as kind of cosily superior and untouchable. Instead of blocking, ignoring offensive posts is probably as effective. And allows space for discussion and change.

Half of Frank Ryan

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Had a browse through my old sketch pad that tipped up during the recent loft sort out and came across this gem.

Who is Frank Ryan? I can’t remember. It was drawn during my overland gig across Africa which makes it more mysterious. I google the name and find Frank Ryan, celebrity plastic surgeon who died in 2010 after driving his car off a cliff in Malibu, while tweeting about his dog Jill. (Jill survived with mild injury). Too young to be this Frank Ryan, but a salutary tale about tweeting about the dog while driving.

The only plausible Frank Ryan is the controversial Irish republican.  I deduce this through a vague likeness to the drawing in google images, and then remember a couple of deeply political Dublin boys we met along the way all those years ago.

Why only half? No idea.

Of tits and trolls

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Two hugely inflated ‘stories’. Pics of ‘royal tits’ for sale? I’m not condoning the practice at all, but really, if Will, that strange talking palace and the media had stopped banging on about em, would anyone have really cared? The photos can’t be untaken, and once in the public domain, will never disappear. Get over it*.

Then trolls. A ‘phenomenon’ that appeared with social media, particularly twitter. Interpreted by some as a form of cyber bullying which is serious, of course, but the label seems to be applied to any bit of tongue in cheek banter, or edgy comment, that before ‘trolls’ were constructed, would have been ignored. Twitter, handily, provides a tool for dealing with anyone who you might find offensive. The block button. Press it and move on.

*And maybe get on with something.

Twitter; what’s the point?

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I love Twitter. But lots of people I know, don’t. They don’t get it. They hold onto facebook as a space for sharing stuff with chosen, monitored and policed others. Facebook is more intimate, apparently, and isn’t about stalking Scoph, Stephen Fry or Justin Beiber. Facebook doesn’t restrict status updates to 140 characters. What can you say in 140 characters for fuck’s sake? Well, I’ll come back to that..

I went to a social media talk recently by an expert from York University. He strongly cautioned against our increasing over reliance on social media, saying it would lead to us all creating very narrow social lives, funnelling down, bookmarking our favourite websites and increasingly closing ourselves off to broader social experiences. Facebook can do that. We select certain people that we allow into our circle and can even restrict levels of access to our personal lives. It is static, dated and restrictive.

Twitter smashes things wide open. Even though we choose who we follow, once we follow people, we can’t choose what they retweet to us. So if I was to follow 100 people, and they each followed a hundred people, and so on and so on (I ain’t no mathematician so I’m not even going to attempt to develop this equation/sum), that means I am potentially open to shedloads of information, in bite size pieces.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you twitter doubters say. What-effer. You can interact via email or facebook. Not as fast or as effectively. Increasingly, Twitter is part of media stories about particular events. Twitfeed is feeding into live tv and news coverage. It’s forcing governments, institutions, people to be more accountable. Through Twitter, a recent petition against proposed NHS reform has got over 170,000 signatures in a few days. Through Twitter a group of disabled people were able to raise funding, research, write up and disseminate their report into the proposed Welfare Reform Bill. Through Twitter (not through the BBC or other media channels) we know that Andrew Lansley’s recent trip to the Royal Free ended up with him being chased by a doc down the corridor to the words “Your bill is rubbish. And you know it!” Through Twitter, people are able to demonstrate and provide evidence of lies, deceit and cheating (largely by the current UK government at the mo’).

What can you tweet in 140 characters? Well, a lot. You’ve just got to be concise, pithy and cut out so much crap that we usually produce/circulate. It’s a liberating experience.

Twitter is what you make it. Depending on who you follow. It can be supportive, political, social, entertaining, funny, informative, creative and always fresh.

Finally, for mates that have shouted ‘help!, I don’t know how to use it’.. here are a few things that I’ve learnt in the last few months (or days;);

  • Use bit ly to shorten web links you want to tweet.
  • Don’t get overly hung up on what you tweet – just have fun
  • At first you are tweeting to yourself, but people will start to follow you
  • Don’t get hung up on numbers…
  • … but if your followers start to unfollow you en masse, you may want to revisit your tweet content 😉
  • #ff means follow Friday and is a way of sharing ‘good’ people to follow

Now, if someone wants to let me know the best way to manage lists, that would be great.