It’s been quite a week for Clare Balding.
She joined Twitter last Tuesday, with the specific intention, or so it seemed at the time, of calling AA Gill a twat. This wasn’t, I should add, a random act of abuse, merely a response to an article in The Sunday Times in which Gill referred to her as a ‘dyke on a bike’.
Now I don’t intend to take sides on this. All I will say is that The Sunday Times doesn’t seem an appropriate place to display childishness, homophobia and ignorance.
We have The Daily Mail for that.
It does seem, though, as if Mr Gill has aroused the ire of quite a section of society. The row has escalated to the extent that John Prescott joined the fray, referring to Gill as a sh**. (Either the asterisks refer to an erudite footnote and AA Gill is a ‘sh’, or he meant ‘shit’.)
Pithy though the epithets ‘twat’ and ‘sh**’ are, they are no more than ‘sixth in the semi-final and hoping to be one of the fastest losers’ when compared to Emma Kennedy, who in a flash of Usain Bolt-like inspiration branded the Sunday Times journalist ‘a cockjuggling thundercunt’.
That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is championship-quality swearing. Hats off. With form like that Kennedy will surely have a chance of glory in the Potty-Mouthing event come 2012.
Swearing, enjoyable though it may be, is not the point of this post, however.
The blogosphere is littered with invective concerning the joys (hurrah!) or perils (boo!) of Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Hobnob (made that one up) and other forms of ‘social media’.
While I am an avid user of at least one of these, I am interested by the use of the word ‘social’ in this context. It is a curious way of describing a phenomenon that encourages people to spend more time interacting with their myriad computing devices than with their families and (real) friends.
Be that as it may, these sites do have their uses. Where else would it be possible to be ignored by so many celebrities simultaneously? Or gather ‘followers’ who wouldn’t recognise you if you trod on their toes?
There are those who poo-poo Twitter. Well, at the risk of plagiarising Blackadder, I see your poo-poo and raise you another poo-poo.
One of the joys of Twitter is that it can be what you make of it. Faced with the limitation of 140 characters, and the opportunity to reach thousands of people without actually having to go anywhere or meet any of them, there are those who have decided to use it for professional development and ‘reaching a wider audience’.
Others see at as a way of sharing stuff they’ve seen on the internet, a development for which I am profoundly grateful. If it hadn’t been for them I wouldn’t have thought to revisit Dave Allen, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe & Wise, Tommy Cooper, Cheers and many others.
And while the days of tweeting such things as ‘I am now going to go upstairs and brush my teeth’ are thankfully long gone (mostly), there are still others who spend most of their time bantering with their mates, passing wry comment on the passing world and generally wasting time. So much cheaper and less debilitating than going to the pub.
In many ways, Twitter is (or at least feels) liberating. Other people’s banalities are mercifully short; and your own are quickly lost in the swirling maelstrom that is the Twitter timeline. If someone likes it, they can prolong its life it for a few more minutes with the blessed Retweet. If it’s rubbish, it’s gone in an instant.
Well, apart from being preserved for ever in the Library of Congress, which for most people probably isn’t as scary as it sounds (“Aagghh! Future generations will know what I had for breakfast on January 29th 2010! I’m ruined!”).
For my part, I use it as a relatively harmless way of offloading the ridiculous and juvenile thoughts with which I would normally torment my family (although of course it doesn’t stop me from sharing with them as well. Lucky things.)
This may explain how a simple tweet about the cricket the other day developed into a tweet exchange that culminated in a potential surrealist sitcom starring Martin Clunes and Salvador Dali and featuring a euphonium-playing fish.
All you have to do now is wade through twenty billion tweets to find out why.