Byline: Anne Gildea
I have young friend who helps me with New Technology -- he regularly explains how all new various wastes of time, sorry, cutting-edge social communication platforms, interface and how I should use them. And I just as regularly forget everything he's told me. And off we go again.
I tried to blog, once. But it felt silly, like going 'me, me, me', idiotically assuming anyone would be interested but me. (Unlike the finely wrought reams of insight I write here, says you.) But blogging is a useful promotional tool, a PR chum tells me. Yes, like a hammer for bashing people over the head whilst shouting 'Look, me! I exist! C'est moi! Bish, bash, bosh.' But I see what she's saying: Yo! You need to assert the Youness of You Composing a character is like having to if You're serious about You and Your Place in the Modern World. We all need to be the personal marketing managers of our own identities these days, it seems. Plus some people have even got book deals out of their blogging efforts, you can be dead clever about it all.
But I come from perhaps the last Irish generation who were raised on notions of personal discretion and modesty. 'Would the Virgin Mary have been a blogger?' is the kind of question we'd have been encouraged to ponder. And the answer would be: No, probably not. I can't help thinking that if you want to write a book, why don't you just go ahead and write a bloody book, and stop diddling round on the internet? Oldfashioned That's what I am.
Then a young friend showed me Twitter. He set me up on it. 'Now write something,' he said. My hands jigged above the keys. 'I can't. Let me think about it,' I pleaded. 'I'll come back to it,' I promised.
'What a hopeless oldie,' I could see him thinking. How difficult can it be to come up with words comprising not more that 140 characters? To some people, that's a quick blurt, but to others (me) it's the challenge of producing a veritable haiku. But later, I did return. And I've joined the gang. I'm now a Twit! For my first tweet I mentioned an exhibition I'd been at. I said -- wait for it... I liked it. I have now arrived in Brave New World Land.
I knew little about Twitter before I began. I'd heard Demi & Ashton, the ultimate 'Is that a marriage or a PR stunt?' Hollywood couple, were early aficionados (point against). And that Twitter, it is claimed, was pivotal in recent revolutions. I guess someone tweeted: 'Had enough of the thieving, murdering, despotic, supportedby-Western-powers monster who's in charge here, anyone?' And someone else tweeted back 'yep'. Next thing there's hundreds of thousands camping out on the street and voila, regime change (point for).
Plus I knew Twitter had gone from zero to 95 million messages per day in the space of a couple of years. So 'bandwagon', 'jump on' and 'why not?' were considerations. Best of all it's so easy, and short. Forget haikus. Let's face it -- 140 characters; even if you've nothing to say it's still so easy to say it.
Once you're up and running with your own 'handle' (mine's @AnneGildea) Twitter has an information bar that tells you 'who to follow'. You probably know this already but please allow me to be naively amazed. The first two I clicked on were comics -- Bill Bailey and Sarah Silverman, respective current tweets at the time: 'a woodlouse has just evolved in my garden, become sentient, its first words to me were "stop Jedward" and "the crotch of my tights is about 4 below the crotch of my crotch."' Wowee -- how did I live without this info stream till now?
Then I started 'following' Charlie Sheen, the 'unemployed winner', according to himself; the publicly imploding sitcom thespian according to everyone else. We joined Twitter around the same time. He got a million followers within a day. I got 37 -- ruthless indicator of your standing in the world, this ol' Twitter thing. He tweeted that he has tigerblood in his veins. '#tigerblood', he wrote. Hashtag tigerblood is now trending big time. Does that sentence I just wrote mean anything? Yes, apparently. This is futurespeak, now! I tweeted '#thenualas' to promote our upcoming gig in Vicar St. It's not 'trending' but it felt proactive. I probably don't have enough followers.
'Followers'. I love that notion. Imagine if they had Twitter in the time of Christ: how handy for Him. Imagine the Jesus tweets: 'Why not follow me? #sonofgod'; 'And then I said unto him arise from the dead, and he did! #lazarus!'. Would the apostles have been like: 'Hey, man, is it okay if we just "follow" you on Twitter?' Would the ability to just click a button to 'unfollow' have scuppered vocations? In the time it's taken to write this, I've been 'unfollowed' once. I'm down to 36. What to do, #tigerblood?
'Twitter, the best way to discover what's new in your world,' the website boasts. Well, actually, you could just look out the window, or chat to your chums. But I guess that's not how things are done any more. #boohoo, I find that a bit sad.
anne.gildea@mailonsunday.ie
Did you know? Tweets are designed to be no more than 140 characters long so that they can be sent through mobile phone SMS services
EQUINOXES Spring begins tonight at 11.21 in the Northern Hemisphere, the vernal or March equinox There are 2 equinoxes a year, around March 20-21 and September22-23 Contrary to common belief, the length of time between sunrise and sunset is closest to being 12 hours during the equilux, which generally falls on a different day to the equinox Equinoxes occur about 6 hours later every year, with a jump of 1 day backwards on Leap Years
No comments:
Post a Comment