I've had a few topics running around in my head for potential blog posts this week, but this morning I woke up thinking about Twitter (never a good sign), so I'll start with that.
Short Twitter summary for the uninitiated who do not have Twitter (sad. sad. sad.)
Twitter is a 'microblogging' website, of beautiful simplicity, where the user posts short comments of up to 140 characters. The user is able to follow others and be followed, send direct messages, post pictures through links, and follow trends - particular phrases which are cropping up frequently within a geographical area, e.g. the UK. #Hashtagging is used to highlight the topic or key words of a 'tweet', making it instantly searchable. And that's basically it.
For want of a better start, some shameless self promotion! If you have enjoyed my blog, please follow my Twitter - @corybantically - where you can find obscure opinions, random rants, perplexing politics, wonderful words, and other alliterative things that pleased me less when writing this sentence. In the world of Twitter, I am a small fish (or should that be a chick?). At the time of writing, I have 103 followers and 2217 tweets. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit to how many tweets you can send, and many people pass the 10,000 mark. Archetypal 'tweeter' Stephen Fry has sent 12356 tweets and has 4,612,268 followers, as of 11.10am today. Well, I would have more followers, but I block the spambots and pornstars.*
Rapidly gaining users, Twitter has been expanding at an explosive speed. It's useful, fast, and easier to remain anonymous than on Facebook. The ease of communication has made it a key tool on 'the street'; faster than the news websites, more open than Facebook, and more diverse than any other network, it's a brilliant tool to start a revolution. Sitting in my bedroom in the free(ish) world, I have to nod respectfully at Twitter for its part in the revolutions in the middle east. It would be an exaggeration to say that Twitter caused the revolutions, but it certainly enabled them. Twitter is a great place for meeting new people, although you have to be careful. It's, quite simply, the best place to stay abreast of current affairs. Also Justin Bieber and One Direction, but you learn to filter them out.
Yet the thing that is really making Twitter famous is the moral and legal dilemmas it throws up. We all know that the internet is rewriting the rules of privacy, but Twitter has created more scandals than any other. We've all heard about the problems enforcing injunctions as secrets are leaked over Twitter. Some people use the anonymity of Twitter to spread this information successfully, and notorious groups like hackers Anonymous have twitter accounts, yet the police are also using twitter and it has become not uncommon to hear of arrests made as a result of people posting on social networking, such as during the London Riots last year.
More controversial are the cases where the arrest is due to action on social networking. At what point does an action cease to become a right, through freedom of speech, and become an offence? The jury are still out - quite literally. The #TwitterJokeTrial, concerning a joke tweet about blowing up a local airport has only just cleared in favour of the defendant. It's clear to anyone rational that it was a joke, but in the end, it could be construed as a serious threat. A visit from the police could have solved the issue, but instead time and money has been wasted and one poor man's life has suffered because of a flippant comment he made on Twitter. The ease with which the kind of silly comments we make to each other every day of the street can become newspaper headlines is astounding.
Only today another Twitter scandal resulted in an arrest. One user, a young guy, sent a series of abusive tweets to GB diver Tom Daley, accusing him of letting his recently deceased father down and making death threats. It's easy enough to see that this is just an idiot with too much publicity, speaking without thinking, but his words were abusive and inappropriate. The question is whether they were serious enough to precipitate an arrest. For me, the line is whether it would have had the same outcome if he'd said it in real life, passing Daley on the street; thing is, I don't think he would have. People perceive the internet as a great big shield they can use to say or do anything (the term is trolling), but they're wrong. And so we have to create a new code of behaviour and new laws about rights specific to the online community, and they're far from ready. The internet is moving on faster than the judicial system at least can handle it.
The other, more mild gripe, I have with Twitter is that there are vast amounts of irritating people with nothing interesting to say who amass thousands of followers by bargaining for followers with each other. The less subtle of these style actually including the hashtag #TeamFollowback or similar on their profiles, and they have very 'hipster' bio's - naming bands they like, declaring their love for tea, posing semi-naked with a caption like 'i'm so ugly. yeah'. I think you have to be a teenager to appreciate fully how this works. I'm sure their lovely people in reality, but in the world of Twitter - designed with a vague hope people will use their 140 characters to make insightful comments - these people are particularly frustrating. The ways it works is this: They ask their followers to RT (retweet) them to get to a particular number of followers, e.g. "I'm 10 off 150! RT!". They exchange 'shoutouts' with each other. So Mary tells all her followers to follow @Emma "because she's a lovely person so all follow her. RT" and in return Emma tells all her followers to follow "@Mary because she's wonderful and you'll all like her." In reality, neither of them have ever met - they just follow each other on twitter and neither is particularly interested in what the other has to say.(Then they unfollow you so that their follow count is higher than their 'following') Actually, I'm not convinced any of these people ever read their timelines - they follow hundreds, if not thousands of people, and the majority of those millions of tweets are frankly, banal nonsense. Such is the world of the internet, it's just that Twitter emphasises the sheer volume of this nonsense.
But surely you don't have to follow these people? Of course not. And you can block anyone on Twitter who is sending you spam or giving you unwanted attention. More effectively, you can protect your tweets so only certain people can see them. I'm not a protected tweet-er - for the moment, at least - so I do occasionally encounter unwanted attention on Twitter. Recently I decided to enter a conversation with a stranger on Twitter via email. It was a lovely conversation, but after 7 years of having 'do not talk to strangers on the internet' drummed into me at school, I realised what I was doing was deeply unsafe, so I stopped replying. I've probably hurt the feelings of a lovely and ordinary person out there, but in the end, you just can't be too careful. That was hard, but the internet isn't a playground. It horrifies me to think of the way I used the internet when I was younger. My parents, quite rightly, wouldn't allow me to join a social network, so I joined Piczo, Bebo and Myspace (twice!) behind their back, and happily posted all sorts of information about myself and pictures without security controls. I have now been able to delete most of that - the Piczo and Bebo accounts are gone, and the information has been removed from Myspace. Strangely enough, the 'deactivate account' button on Myspace doesn't work, and the customer service line never answered my messages... When I've finished this blog, I'm going to go and play with my Google+ account. I love most of the Google services, like this one, but I can't figure Google+ out - and I'd like it to be displaying a little less information about myself!
Forgive me for rambling. Having started this blog to discuss Twitter, rather than follow a line of argument, I've allowed myself to digress and procrastinate. It's now Wednesday the first of August, 13.39, and Stephen Fry still has 12,356 tweets, but has gone up to 4,617,463 followers. His Twitter is hilarious - satire and wisdom combined. For all the nonsense, Twitter is a great window into the lives of many fabulous people, ordinary and famous alike, and useful organisations - I started following Team GB yesterday! If only, like Mr Fry, my followers would increase by over 5000 whilst on a 4 week Twitter hiatus in Uganda...
Time to send another tweet.
Do you have an opinion on this? Or even better, a twitter account? ;)
Leave a comment or send me a tweet :)
J.R. x
* Don't let me put you off Twitter. Hey, I'm sure those spambots and pornstars aren't all bad.
