To tweet or not to tweet
I knew Twitter could be an addictive pursuit. This was one of my reasons for avoiding it for so long. However, after almost two years of resistance, I broke my twitter virginity on the 6th of July 2014. At the time of writing I have posted seven hundred and seventy one tweets – some penetrative, some not. My fall happened after a broadcast journalist friend explained to me that, as a twitter junkie, he wouldn’t see what I was doing unless my tweets were included in his feed.
The morning after this conversation I decided there was no shame in using social media platforms.
If you were trying to sell your self (and aren’t we all?) it was foolhardy of me to miss out on any opportunity to build my profile. But I was a little nervous. What would I say in my first tweet? Would it provoke some awful trolls to unleash their rage? I needn’t have worried. Posting a tweet when you have no followers is like sulking on your own: it has no effect. So I can report that the internet-earth didn’t move after my first tweet – “If you need a Renaissance woman, I’m your man” - although I felt it was a pretty good performance for a first-timer.
Regularly condensing my thoughts into 140 characters can take up an inordinate amount of time. I have had at least one all-nighter refining a tweet. This was during the Garth Brooks/Croke Park debacle and the final tweet was posted, somewhat bleary eyed, on the morning of 16th July as “Garth Bear says to Mama Bear “Someone's eaten ALL my porridge!"” I also have to admit to an embarrassing loss of critical faculties when I see some of the pictures posted by various tweeters. You know the sort of thing. A tiny bunny yawning while lying in the palm of a human hand. A baby tiger hugging its mother. A fluffy baby donkey. I hover my pointer over the retweet button and... Oh Lord. Where is this going? What have I done?
I have already gained and lost a few followers on twitter, including the notable Franz Kafka who followed me for a day only to un-follow me the next day. The twittersphere, you see, is a very fickle place. On the other hand I am following over two hundred people with one of these being a twitterbot (not a real person). These bots spit out automated tweets based on random criteria hoovered up from somewhere in the digital stratosphere. For example @TwoHeadlines mashes together headlines from Google News with a trending topic combined with a noun change. “Manchester United F.C. Say They're the World's Biggest Vinyl Retailer” is the sort of post you might read. While this sort of automated tweet can be amusing, by far the most savage (but entertaining) tweet I have read was written by a real person - the acerbic Stephen Fry during the Leveson enquiry – “It would seem David Cameron's address is no longer Number 10 Downing Street: it's now Flat 2, Rupert Murdoch's arse.”
The funniest part of this tale happened in my pre-twitter time while I was immersed in a publishing project that was nearing completion in the autumn of 2013. I had been looking for suitable gallery space for the exhibition of prints that was to accompany the launch of my book The Visual Time Traveller. A café called Kaph on Drury Street had been suggested as a possible venue, so I had popped in to check it out.
The young woman serving there explained to me that the manager Chris made all the decisions about exhibitions but he wasn’t there. She gave me a business card, wrote his name on it, and said the only way to contact him was on Facebook or Twitter. I studied the card. No telephone number. No email address. I didn’t have a personal Facebook page and wasn’t on Twitter. Struggling to find a way to contact him – and I could see that she was too busy to help me with this - I studied the card again. I suddenly noticed there was an email address on the card – it was shown with a small picture of a bird followed by @kaphsc (see the picture of the business card at the top of this page)
Delighted with myself for figuring out this graphic depiction of an email address I said to her “Oh, is his email address actually bird@kaphsc.ie?” And I then proceeded to spell it out for her when she looked confused. “Is his email address B I R D at kaph dot ie?” My grown up children (Aisling, David and Nicholas) have been dining out on this story for some time.
@21CRenaissance
I knew Twitter could be an addictive pursuit. This was one of my reasons for avoiding it for so long. However, after almost two years of resistance, I broke my twitter virginity on the 6th of July 2014. At the time of writing I have posted seven hundred and seventy one tweets – some penetrative, some not. My fall happened after a broadcast journalist friend explained to me that, as a twitter junkie, he wouldn’t see what I was doing unless my tweets were included in his feed.
The morning after this conversation I decided there was no shame in using social media platforms.
If you were trying to sell your self (and aren’t we all?) it was foolhardy of me to miss out on any opportunity to build my profile. But I was a little nervous. What would I say in my first tweet? Would it provoke some awful trolls to unleash their rage? I needn’t have worried. Posting a tweet when you have no followers is like sulking on your own: it has no effect. So I can report that the internet-earth didn’t move after my first tweet – “If you need a Renaissance woman, I’m your man” - although I felt it was a pretty good performance for a first-timer.
Regularly condensing my thoughts into 140 characters can take up an inordinate amount of time. I have had at least one all-nighter refining a tweet. This was during the Garth Brooks/Croke Park debacle and the final tweet was posted, somewhat bleary eyed, on the morning of 16th July as “Garth Bear says to Mama Bear “Someone's eaten ALL my porridge!"” I also have to admit to an embarrassing loss of critical faculties when I see some of the pictures posted by various tweeters. You know the sort of thing. A tiny bunny yawning while lying in the palm of a human hand. A baby tiger hugging its mother. A fluffy baby donkey. I hover my pointer over the retweet button and... Oh Lord. Where is this going? What have I done?
I have already gained and lost a few followers on twitter, including the notable Franz Kafka who followed me for a day only to un-follow me the next day. The twittersphere, you see, is a very fickle place. On the other hand I am following over two hundred people with one of these being a twitterbot (not a real person). These bots spit out automated tweets based on random criteria hoovered up from somewhere in the digital stratosphere. For example @TwoHeadlines mashes together headlines from Google News with a trending topic combined with a noun change. “Manchester United F.C. Say They're the World's Biggest Vinyl Retailer” is the sort of post you might read. While this sort of automated tweet can be amusing, by far the most savage (but entertaining) tweet I have read was written by a real person - the acerbic Stephen Fry during the Leveson enquiry – “It would seem David Cameron's address is no longer Number 10 Downing Street: it's now Flat 2, Rupert Murdoch's arse.”
The funniest part of this tale happened in my pre-twitter time while I was immersed in a publishing project that was nearing completion in the autumn of 2013. I had been looking for suitable gallery space for the exhibition of prints that was to accompany the launch of my book The Visual Time Traveller. A café called Kaph on Drury Street had been suggested as a possible venue, so I had popped in to check it out.
The young woman serving there explained to me that the manager Chris made all the decisions about exhibitions but he wasn’t there. She gave me a business card, wrote his name on it, and said the only way to contact him was on Facebook or Twitter. I studied the card. No telephone number. No email address. I didn’t have a personal Facebook page and wasn’t on Twitter. Struggling to find a way to contact him – and I could see that she was too busy to help me with this - I studied the card again. I suddenly noticed there was an email address on the card – it was shown with a small picture of a bird followed by @kaphsc (see the picture of the business card at the top of this page)
Delighted with myself for figuring out this graphic depiction of an email address I said to her “Oh, is his email address actually bird@kaphsc.ie?” And I then proceeded to spell it out for her when she looked confused. “Is his email address B I R D at kaph dot ie?” My grown up children (Aisling, David and Nicholas) have been dining out on this story for some time.
@21CRenaissance
