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| Tidy the Pugalier: "Stephen Fry has blocked me again." |
I’ve been
chucking out brain wibbles of 140 characters or less on Twitter for (I think) about 3
years now, and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. I feel that I am my peak
abilities of communication when trying to work out if I can keep that
apostrophe in, or if that will push the tweet over the 140 character limit.
(Don’t even get me started on the TweetLonger options available. If you want to
bang on for longer than Twitter’s cut-off character limit, piss off back to
Facebook where you belong, you vociferous time wasters.) I love the fact that
you can watch politicians literally end their careers with a drunken smashing
of their smartphone keypad after they’ve had eight-too-many Beaujolais
in the publically funded parliament bar. I love the fact that I can follow my
friends when they’re on a night out and can be up to date on who got kicked out
of what club, without having to make the effort to change out of my comfy pants
with the moth holes in the arse.
As my
time on Twitter progressed, I started following a variety of different people to
the ones I had started off with. My feed spread to include a lot of columnists
and journalists, food bloggers and reviewers, radio presenters and newsreaders.
And slowly I started to realise that they all knew each other. They were all,
constantly tweeting each other. Making hilarious, pithy observations amongst
themselves. They all seemed like they were having so much fun, all the time!
How wonderful!
The
problem that then becomes apparent, however is that YOU CAN’T JOIN THEM. Oh you
can tweet them an amusing anecdote along the same lines of their conversations;
sure. Will they respond to you? Chances are pretty slim. This doesn’t
necessarily mean that they’re lording it up on Twitter Hill, refusing to
acknowledge the pleb population of the Great Unwashed below. The people in
question have 100,000 plus followers usually – their @ replies are constantly
pouring in, racing down the page like so many Watership Down bunny rabbits
after the first barbeque of the season. They’re never going to see you. But
that doesn’t mean you don’t try, does it?
Or does
it? I confess when I first turned to Twitter, I didn’t quite get it and was a
lot less discerning about who I would tweet. Until I realised that if I had a
mate who followed both me and whatever minor celebrity I had tried to muscle my
opinions on to, they would be able to see both my excitable tweet to
aforementioned minor celeb, and the uncomfortable radio silence that followed
as my tweet went unacknowledged. I don’t need that. I spent the majority of my
formative years in high school going to parties and being ignored. I don’t need
to recreate this scenario in my adult years, nor do I need to parade it online in front of
everyone else. I can embarrass myself in actual public quite competently,
thanks very much.
But a few
years down the line and something has changed. After careful observation from
afar on when it is appropriate to interject in a Twitter conversation, I have
slowly began to start garnering responses from the very people who would have turned
their nose up at my “HAAAI GUYS DO YOU LIKE LOLCOPTERZ” attempts at
conversation not so long ago. I’ve amazingly received @ replies from some of my
heroes – Grace Dent agreed with me about The Daily Show being cancelled from
More 4. Jay Rayner has been round the @ replies with me. Richard Bacon tweeted a one word reply – “yes”
– in response to my bemoaning missing his radio show the previous day. Is that
an agreement? An air punch? Who knows. Giles Coren has tweeted me TWICE in two
days. A number of members of Elbow have politely replied, with an air of “back
away from the crazy” implied. Basically, in my mind, I’m IN. Twitter LOVES ME. These
people are all my NEW BEST FRIENDS.
My
internal belief that I am actually friend with all these online bods probably
culminated on Saturday, when I set off for a charity walk with my friend Kat.
Walking past Embankment tube, I stopped, mid-walk, and screamed out “HAAAAI
GARETH!!”, waving wildly to a brilliantly coiffeured young man sat outside the
tube station. He stared at me, with the expression
of someone not entirely sure if they should be ringing the emergency services
at this juncture, before hesitantly waving back. This was not an unusual reaction for him to have, considering
HE HAD NEVER MET ME BEFORE. I follow him on Twitter and recognised him from his
avatar. It’s the equivalent of wandering up to Ryan Gosling in Tesco in your S
Club 7 pyjamas, and telling him that you’d been considering leaving your
husband for him. This person doesn’t actually know you. You probably shouldn’t
do that to them.
But bless
Gareth, he was extremely gracious under pressure and we struck up a lovely
conversation over the @ replies. And I went away feeling very happy that I’d
shouted out like a crazy person, which is not a reaction crazy people normally
have about frightening Northern chaps in public. Because for all the talk about
social media creating more distance between people, as we apparently move
towards communicating solely through handsets and computer screens; in that
moment I had made connection with a Real Life Human Being, which never would
have happened had it not been for Twitter. And that can only be a good thing.
