There was a mini-backlash over my decision to quit Twitter for a while.
Some of you are with me, some are against. In fact, I can almost divide the ‘thank goodness you quit’ versus the ‘when are you coming back?’ into age groups. It seems that the over-40’s aren’t that interested in distilling their lives into 140 characters. Or maybe they’re just busy making sure the kids are fed and watered?
And while my boyfriend, who is in his early thirties and a huge fan of Twitter, says he understands why I wanted time out, we’ve had some interesting conversations about it in the last couple of weeks.
He likes the way it keeps him plugged in. But he’s also a comedian and the reaction he gets from his followers as regards being ‘favourited’, or having his tweets retweeted, is important to him.
Now I’ve had more time to digest the reasons I deactivated my account, I think the thing that makes me most mad about Twitter it is that it can be a form of bullying.
Yes you can get the news, follow people’s reactions to live events and stay in touch with your mates but it’s also very competitive. I don’t want to use the phrase ‘dick-swinging’, yet I somehow feel compelled to.
What’s interesting to me is that the people who are doing the bullying on Twitter are probably the ones who were bullied themselves. Twitter is, in essence, revenge of the nerds.
For example, a couple of days ago basketball legend Michael Jordan tweeted, ‘I love the smell of the rain’.
Innocuous enough you would think. Sweet, even. A billion dollar sports star who’s known for his ability on the basketball court stops for a moment to think about the smell of rain and tweets his thoughts.
It’s not ground-breaking, it’s at best psuedo poetic (and more than a few would say cheesy) but someone out there in twittosphere was driven to retweet it simply because it demonstrated MJ’s lack of personality in such a hilarious manner that it deserved to be mocked. I think that’s an act of bullying.
Recent other tweets of his included, ‘I’m so sick of using batteries’, ‘I banged my knee real hard today’ and ‘I just don’t understand why England still has a Queen’.
Granted, not earth-shatteringly interesting, incisive or funny but he’s quite good at his day job I hear, so I’m not sure I expect him to be Shakespeare or Dawkins on his time off.
Bullying is where you hold someone up to ridicule because you think you are better/funnier/smarter/sexier than they are. I’m not saying that we should be shiny happy people all time because frankly, some people out there do deserve to be brought down a peg or two, and after interviewing celebrities for that past 15 years I can safely report that many of them seem to have bypassed a personality chip. But using this as a reason to tweet seems downright churlish.
At school, I was bullied. It was a bloody long time time ago now but I still remember what it’s like to be rounded on by a pack of young idiots who were no better than me but yet by some invisible yardstick were deemed ‘cool’ or ‘attractive’.
So bullying, of any kind, still rankles.
I’m not saying Twitter is bad, I just think that when it becomes an ignoble hobby, it’s not something I want to be part of.
I’m not going to spend too long feeling sorry that someone took the mickey out of Michael. He’s a successful and popular athlete, what does he care? But that one act summed up everything I dislike about Twitter.
I don’t have a problem with the nerds running the show, but nerds – I’m talking directly at you now – remember what it felt like when you weren’t the cool one in school?
To reboot my grandmother’s favourite saying, ‘If you can’t tweet something nice, tweet nothing at all’.
