140 Characters and Counting

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.