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.