Tweaking the tweet…

CHRIS BENNETT has been poking his nose into other peoples business.

 

CURIOSITY has driven me to investigate Twitter, and find out if it is as mindless as it sounds.

 

It is and it isn’t. My research over a few days last week coincided with the bizarre events in Teheran which were then dominating the news. I had read in last week’s Time magazine an article by one Steven Johnson, an

American technophile and writer. The article is worth reading, and you should find it if you search Twitter (try googling search-twitter) for #timetwitter.

 

For some time now a number of friends and others who should know better, have been asking if I am on Facebook. Well, no, not as such.

 

I have visited Facebook and found out for myself what was meant by the discomfiting phrase ‘social networking’. I was immediately reminded of a time many years ago, when we had a half-decent radio service, of the tendency towards what I call the static cling and creep of talk shows.

 

Talk shows, in which the anchorman of the station uses a phone line to give listeners (screened) access to the airwaves, emerged in South Africa in the later 1980s. The first thing that the powers that be in broadcasting discovered was that talk shows were a lot cheaper than using clever people to make programmes, which meant the expenditure of a lot of money on things like royalties for music, staff to write and devise, and produce programmes.

 

Most people listen to radio because of the companionship it offers, especially to those on their own. They are aware of another presence who is, if he knows his job, addressing them as an individual, and an intelligent one at that. For older people, of whom there is no shortage on the South Coast, radio is a godsend.

 

You can listen to the radio and do just about anything. Radio is interactive; it requires the listener to excercise his imagination, whereas television simply numbs that marvellous human faculty.

 

Radio educates; television entertains. Radio also reassures, and stills the fretting mind.

 

 

 

Kate Chisholm, the radio critic of the Spectator, recently wrote about the release of statistics showing that more people in Britain listen to the radio now than ever before since its inception.

 

But money is money, and the programming bathwater of yesterday was thrown out along with the baby of  inventiveness and stimulation.

 

Social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, seems to have attracted incalculable numbers of followers, and probably for the same reason in the rapid rise of talk radio some years ago. Which is in some ways not surprising, but in others is.

 

It is not surprising because there is a distinct similarity between Twitter and the text message, or SMS as we clumsily call it. On Twitter, which can be transmitted via the net or from your smartphone, your message is limited to 140 characters, which includes punctuation (few people use it), mood indicators (? and !) and spaces between words. These messages are called ‘tweets’. And so they should be.

 

But it is also surprising that so many people have been swept up in the wave of enthusiasm which is currently engulfing the airwaves of the chatterati. The reason I say this, and remember I have spent several hours on line looking at this lot, is that it is all so meaningless and toe-curlingly shallow. 

 

A point I should make, though, is that having followed the ructions in the aftermath of the Iranian election on Twitter (#iranelection) is that the network outstripped all other media forms for the simple reason that the messages were coming in real time; and that at about 20 a second.

 

So, although, as some boffins think, tweeting may be here to stay, I shall not succumb to being a twit. 

Nothing wrong?

The antics of our political leaders before the election, and now the games of the Brits, gave CHRIS BENNETT something to think about.

 

"I HAVE done nothing illegal," said the British politician. Like most British politicians lately, he was squirming about the publication by the daily Telegraph of his expenses claims.

 

I remember some years ago, when I was working in this paper's newsroom, we had on more than one occasion office bearers in our local council who were also under some scrutiny, by this paper among others, for their conduct in the matter of openness and honesty.

 

Not so long ago we had the spectacle of supporters of our new president saying he had done nothing illegal. Well, actually that was never proved; but you get my point. It is not about legality; it is about humanity.

 

Just because something is not illegal does not mean it is right. What happened to the moral compass, and its twin brother, moral courage?

 

What has become of our sense of right and wrong? What became of the old fashioned idea of making a clean breast of things?

 

There is nobility in holding public office, whether it be here or in the mother of parliaments; a nobility that is also to be found in selfless hard work. Somehow the two go hand in hand.

 

The modern febrile tactic of resorting to the letter of the law is pathetic. It does little more than imply guilt on the part of the accused. As the French put it, so very neatly, “Qui s’excuse, s’accuse”. He who excuses himself, accuses himself.

A word no longer used, but like so many old words, pithy and apt, is “inwit”. It was formed in Middle English from in plus wit, the latter meaning the mind as the seat of consciousness and intelligence (we continue the same idea when we talk about native wit or we describe somebody as having a quick wit).

To have inwit meant that you had an inward sense of what was right and wrong. Think halfwit.

 

But enough of the thieving magpies.

                                                             *********************

Winter is with us again, which will mean wrapping up for walks on the beach. The four-thirty afternoon sky has a greyness to it, and there is almost a chill in the air. Winter is always a time for slowing down a bit, and thinking about what has gone before in the year, and what one has done; it is a time for pondering what lies in  the year ahead.

 

Lots of great people have said some glorious things about winter. They may have been talking about the cold, hard and long winter of the northern region of our world, but we have our winters too, though they are milder and shorter.

 

Shakespeare’s Duke of Gloucester spoke of his ‘winter of discontent’, a marvellous expression. Incomparable in its misery, Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan of the ‘English winter, ending in July/To recommence in August’.

 

Here, down on the idyllic coast, the winter brings very special things. The whales, of course, are perhaps the favourites of many. They come here to be away from the Antarctic bitterness, to find safe haven to calve and school their young. Then there are the dolphins and the sardines, accompanied by all the frenzy and excitement of a festival; and, of course, the holidaymakers.

 

In just over a week we shall reach the winter solstice, mid-winter’s day, June 21. The sun will start its return journey to our hemisphere and the days will get longer. It never ceases to amaze me how short our winter really is.  

Ruins of wrack…

Many of the postings in this blog are originally published as my weekly column in the South Coast Herald, a weekly paper for southern KwaZulu-Natal. The beach in question is in the pic.

LAST weekend the tide dumped a great swathe of seaweed along the beach near my house; a great ruddy brown mass of the stuff. It was all atangle with different varieties of sea vegetation, which had a rich lobsterish smell, reminding of one of the advantages of living close to the sea; and there are many.

 

I am not sure why it should be called seaweed; it is, after all, a medley of sea vegetables. Much of it is edible, although seemingly not appealingly edible enough to arouse the interest of the locals.

 

Ruins of wrack wound around strands of half a dozen other types, and beautiful bright green golf ball like things, all related and all algae, according to my reading of the two books I have on seaweed. I chew a few of my favourites, upright codium (codium extricatum) and its other fleshy relatives.

 

There is surprisingly little rubbish, although the occasional reminder of the presence of South Coast fishermen is to be seen in the odd ball of tackle - hook, line and sinker.

 

Lately I have enjoyed the fruits of the council’s labours. The storm damage of a couple of years ago, which wrought havoc on our shores, has now been repaired. Not only repaired but repaired with some thought. The wrecked staircase down to the beach a short distance south of the Impejati estuary has been beautifully rebuilt.

 

What is more the wooden and concrete detritus that scarred this useful amenity have been removed and the sand around it combed; presumably by seven maids with seven mops. The council, whom I imagine are responsible for this fine effort, are to be congratulated warmly.

 

There is a certain pleasure in seeing the results of others’ work, when those results are worthy of admiration. In this cynical age, when we are, understandably, preoccupied with corruption and the theft of our taxes by those in places of trust, it is encouraging to know that there are those in our councils who not only know what to do, but how to do it.

 

Similarly the road in which I live is a dirt track that is graded about every six months. As it slopes down the tarmac at the T-junction every heavy shower creates ruts and crevices. The council have now laid a stretch of gravel on the surface, for which those of us who live there are grateful.

 

Maybe those seven maids have also been using their new brooms to sweep clean.

 

Reading up for the paragraphs on seaweed I consulted Seaweed, a handbook on the benefits of the vegetable, by Valeri G. Cooksley, published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang, New York (2007), and Two Oceans, a splendid guide to the coast around our country, by Branch, Griffiths, Branch and Beckley, published by David Phillip, Cape Town and Johannesburg (1994). My copy of the latter is a fifth impression (2002).

 

My reading of Two Oceans seemed to imply that wrack is found only on the West Coast; however, I was not going to miss the chance to use the headline to this column.