I have been talking to a number of people recently about their use of Twitter. There are different leagues of followers. Most stay in the lower hundreds. And many just put a toe in the water remaining in the lower tens. But there are increasingly those who make the thousands. Then there is the über league: the famous, the attractive and those who have become a cult through Twitter: up in the hundreds of thousands and millions. Justin Bieber has just under 24 million followers. Every time he tweets about his latest song or album (and he has tweeted over 16,000 times) potentially 24 million fans read it. That is a lot of the world’s eyeballs. The mind boggles at what Justin feels every time he fires off a tweet. Jesus comes to mind.
We live in a world of followers, favourites and thumbs up. Screes of strangers, all reading the thoughts of each other, criss-crossing the globe. In just a few years, Twitter has seeped into the lives of the masses, taking over from Facebook, as the social media of choice. There is something reassuring and compelling about having a constant stream of tweets, with their accompanying face profiles, ticker tapering down your mobile or laptop screen. You are in the thick of the buzz. It is free, witty, risqué, ever changing and addictive. One of my colleagues, who spends a lot of time actively participating in the latest online milieu, exclaimed how, if needs be, he could do without Facebook but not Twitter. It has become his lifeline; his way of keeping up and in with the world of academia, politics, family, gossip and everything else. He has tweeted 932 times, has 808 followers and follows 86.
I checked up on a few more of our mutual colleagues and was surprised to see how many were in the 1000s league of followers and followed. Were they all following each other and did they get their students to sign up as par of the course? I can’t imagine having 100s let alone 1000s of people interested in my thoughts each day. I looked up Brian Cox (44 years old, OBE) – and he has become our academic Twitter poster boy (nearly 1 million followers).
The number of followers to followed is rarely symmetrical. It seems we like to be followed more than following others. I wonder how much people care about their stats and when the 1000th follower comes along they get a rush. Then there is Twitter analytics that allows users to “see a plethora of data about their account; for example, information about which tweets are most successful, which tweets caused people to unfollow, and who the most influential users are that reply and retweet their messages.” Is there no end to it…
I asked some of my friends – in their 20s – who they decide to follow and who follows them. What they all have in common is a list of funny people, like Stephen Fry (12,245 tweets, 52,080 following, 4,770,994 followers) and Ricky Gervais (2363 tweets, 49 following, 2,565,807 followers) – thinking they will be drip-fed more of the funny stuff. But funnily enough they’re often rather disappointing since the pros – for obvious reasons – keep their best gags to themselves. A savvy chef I have got to know (5761 tweets; 649 following, 2774 followers) was telling me how he used to put much more out their about himself and his family but now is very professional about what he tweets or retweets – only passing on information about new restaurants, or needing a chef, latest cooking, equipment, new gigs, and what is in the news, such as a jibe about John Terry, etc. Nothing critical, personal or special – in case it suddenly goes viral. You don’t want to put your career on the line because of one impulsive moment. For others, it has become a community board.
Then I randomly landed on some young kid’s twitter feed, whose name was made up all of symbols. His tweets were full of expletives, slang and sex – a wholly different world to the others. His tagline was “A young teen from Brooklyn tryna make a life in VA like my lovely ACE.”
So where is the fun in wiling away the minutes, for some hours, each day on Twitter? For the artisan and the academic – the chef, musician, stand up comic, etc., it has become integral to their working lives, enabling them to continue to be successful and ahead of the game. Keep tweeting and you remain foremost in people’s minds – popping up in their list for the next big party, event, review, conference, etc. For the teens it is a world of racy rap and thrill.
Another friend said he gets a kick out of it when a famous or rich or seemingly big person tweets him back. Sometimes, he will do a random click on a bunch of the followers of Ricky Gervais just to see what happens. And just last week a man who appeared wealthy and said he was into space research had picked up on his tweet on travelling in space and tweeted back.
But perhaps the funniest thing about Twitter is the number of imposters there are. Twitter now provides its aqua blue tick icon as a way of letting you know who is the genuine person amongst the pretenders. But for the uninitiated you could end up being duped. When I started following Wayne Rooney there were several candidates to choose from – and I chose the one with the most followers. Then I had one of those uncanny coincidence experiences. Last week, while channel hopping after the footie, we ended up watching a few minutes of some soap called Benidorm. Two ladies were waiting at the bottom of a water slide for their loved ones to come down and the older one got talking to the other about Twitter. She started telling her about how you never know whether you are following the person you think it is. And, it can be more fun following the person who is impersonating rather than the real one because they are often funnier. I was reminded of one of my classmates, who used to do a wicked Tommy Cooper impersonation all the time, when we were in our early teens, and had the class in stitches because he was much funnier doing the ’just like that’ gag than Tommy Cooper was being Tommy Cooper. And now he is a famous actor with 25,952 followers. That is if it is the real Bradley Walsh.
When I lived in Swansea, in my student days, I often heard it said that the city was the graveyard of ambition – wrongly or rightly attributed to Dylan Thomas, the great welsh poet who once lived there. The sentiment behind this omen was to get out as soon as you could. At the time I never gave it much thought; being a young whipper snapper full of ideas and dreams. But after visiting the city again, a few days ago with seasoned eyes, I can see why it continues to reverberate through the city right down the valleys. While there are pockets of economic growth and a marvellous football stadium gleaming on the outskirts, the city has become pitifully run down, looking a shell of its former proud self.
For a few years I used to live in the Mumbles – a picture postcard fishing village on the outskirts of Swansea. One year, we rented a fisherman’s cottage overlooking the bay, where each night we listened to the moored sailing boats in front of us tinkling in the wind. Between the sea and us was a street full of individual pubs. Each had its fill of real characters whose strong welsh voices sung heartily and told tales into the night. At the end of the road, was a Victorian pier whose wrought iron work was covered in barnacles, rust and seaweed. And at the end of the pier was an enormous nightclub called Cinderellas. It lived up to its name. Every friday night we would end up dancing our socks off to the likes of the Smiths, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, B52s and Billy Idol. This weekly merriment was followed by a Saturday pub lunch at the White Rose, mingling and talking with the locals about the rugby. Then Sunday it was Dylans (a lively mainly student pub) and Monday a rendezvous at Bentleys for a 60s night, a dressed up nightclub, where we put on our glad rags and the locals danced in their stilettos. You just knew where to go each night.
This visit, I had come to Swansea University on business. In the evening we went for a meal at Langland Brasserie, located in a fantastic spot overlooking the pristine bay. I was full of anticipation. However, as my taxi driver drove me along the unfolding Mumbles Road, he looked dolefully at me in his rear mirror and said the Mumbles was not the same anymore. I looked at his reflected self quizzically while squinting at the glistening pier on the horizon in the evening sunlight. I knew times had been bad but I thought that this fishing village would be spared because it had always been overflowing with a joie de vivre. I started listing my favourite haunts – to which he replied gone to each one; even the stalwart Cinderellas, he said, had been knocked off its perch and replaced by a skating rink. I was gutted.
I felt an aching sadness as I walked to the station the next morning past the former social centres – their old signs just barely perceptible. Opposite the station, I noticed a run-down café that was open; with a single Hopperesque man sitting in the window framed by a piece of cardboard, that had a faded shaky “TEA large 90p” handwritten on it. Not far from this very spot I once saw the Specials play. I remembered us all pogo-ing manically to their infectious pop songs. Their hit single “Ghost Town” had a chorus we all loved to sing along to – the prescient lyrics seem more poignant today than in the 80s.
Some people love coming home after a vacation, enjoying the creature comforts of being in their own home and seeing the faces of their pets and loved ones. Others pretend they are still out there; wearing the briefest of beachwear and exposing burnt tans on semi-naked bodies, strutting along the miles of corridors at Heathrow airport, having flown from sunny far-flung places in January, not wanting to face the greyness of Huddersfield, Watford or the like.
A lot of research has been done in the last few years to enhance, extend and facilitate the sharing of photos and memories amongst friends, families and those with memory impairments; there are now a range of ingenious devices, created by my fellow colleagues, that make the joy of remembering closer to the original joy.