I admit, I’m a twit-terer…
If there was a single dedicated reader of this blog, which I am certain there isn’t, they may recall my Social Not-working rant around this time last year. In which I disseminated my palpable disgust for the Facebook world of voyeurs and exhibitionists with aspirations of a life of pseudo celebrity. The gist was that I felt trapped in the cult of Facebook. I had become brainwashed into continually checking what people were up to, developed a ferocious inferiority complex in the face of hundreds of happy snaps that belonged in glossy magazines and most crucially, was venomously anti the constant barrage of friend requests from people I had either deliberately lost touch with or made clear I hated fro the start!
I haven’t changed my mind about the negatives of social networking since then, but I have certainly embraced the positives. I have begun tweeting like an attention-deprived teenager, much to the amusement of my friends, and the apparent distaste of my family. The tweeting, despite its frequency, has so far seen little mention of my family, aside from one horribly ill timed drunken mention of my Grandmother being taken in to hospital in Cairo. I woke up the next morning with no recollection of having tweeted anything of the sort, but I had several missed calls from worried family members. They had known nothing of her illness until they saw my Facebook status, which auto-updates from Twitter.
I was mortified. Why would I have felt the need to do something so insensitive? Well, a couple of bottles of wine had a lot to do with it. But the more likely explanation is that I had received the information through Facebook chat, so tweeting it as an act of catharsis probably seemed natural. If there can be anything “natural” about none face to face communication. This lapse in cyber-courtesy demonstrates why I have had a small epiphany when it comes to all things Web 2.0 and beyond. Because it demonstrates that you can’t blame the tool for its mis-use, only the user. We like to separate ourselves from our actions online; we feel we have a right to behave differently there because it has been regarded as some “virtual” realm where actions don’t have consequences and are not related to what’s happening in “reality”. Which is of course absurd unless you are playing a game, reading a story or watching a film, the nature of fiction and the ways for us to enjoy it have not changed, and neither has reality, the internet is just a new means of delivery.
We can innovate the way people use and consume online media, but we need to stop denying its potential and fictionalising it. It is the most real and tangible evidence of real globalisation that we have seen after decades of trying to deny that a global society would ever occur. It’s here people, it’s been here for decades and it’s probably time to accept it. Embrace it even. I personally believe it’s the way forward, why do we have such a negative opinion of global co-operation? Are we still scared of a world order, dictators and cat stroking evil genius’ taking over from leather office chairs? Is it possible, perhaps, that resisting co-operation actually creates the perfect climate for all those things. Accepting change on every level is difficult but ultimately the only way not to be left vulnerable, and in a tiny way, that’s what my new love of all manner of twittery is about.
I have started regarding social media and the culture of the internet as a kind of third way. It has the potential to do all the things that societal structures of the past could not maintain. It’s the start of a global infrastructure that if allowed to reach its potential would re-write the way we approach just about everything. Yet we’re still resisting. Even at the lowest levels we can’t innovate our approaches enough to make the most of the new tools available to us. The media, for example, recoiled in horror when the internet became an outlet for journalism and entertainment, when they should have been rejoicing at opportunities to re-invent media content. The scope was enormous and we are still not even thinking outside the confines of traditional media. We may have moved content online, but the real potential of the new format has been largely ignored in favour of taking defensive action against the perceived damage it has caused to the more archaic formats.
Somewhere in the recesses of my cold, subjective heart there was a little pit of sadness that tied me to fellow journalists the world over at the plight of print. Today though, that is gone. I find it truly ridiculous that people will lower their opinion of content just because of the medium it is delivered via. I guess it’s human nature, like perceiving more gravity in a speech delivered in received pronunciation than a regional accent. There was a time when broadcast media would avoid a northern twang like the plague in order to retain an authoritative voice. We would find it ridiculous now if the media rated the value of information broadcast by the accent it was read in, and I imagine that’s how we feel about the diverse ranch of mediums now available to us for the written word too.
I have diverted a little from my original discussion of careless tweets, but it does have to do with the reasons that I want to be present and interacting with the internet. I am not expecting to intercept cyber-terrorism or conceive a new political structure with the web at its heart (although I do think that would be a jolly good idea), but I do have very optimistic exectations of the internets place in society as time goes on.
In the meantime, my family can rest assured that the primary outlet for my discontent with them will remain my blog. It may not seem fair but it seems like non-disclosure to me if I leave out the elements of my existence that I feel most driven to divulge. It’s my nature to wear my heart on my sleeve (I hate that phrase by the way, so forgive its inclusion) in person, and I am only comfortable doing the same as a writer. Fortunately though, if I looked to twitter for a release on every beef I have with my loved ones I would never have the time to tweet the more important things, like the colour of my socks or what I’m having for my lunch or the fact that Earls Court has grass on it’s walls today!
If that’s no enough for ya, here’s some further reading in the form of my new blog at Cambridge Agenda Magazine:
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