If you are reading this then I suspect there is a decent chance that you know me or at the very least follow me on twitter. In that case you’ll know I’m pretty much a nobody. An insignificant speck that resides on this great vast planet we call the Earth. I have around 1,500 people who follow me on twitter. That isn’t a large number by any means. So in terms of having a social media platform, I have one just like oh so many others, it is just infinitesimal.
This takes me to this past weekend. On Friday night just before I went up the stairs to Bedfordshire, I saw the story in The Sun that Diane Abbott had been photographed drinking from a can of Mojito on public transport. I was seething so much that I couldn’t sleep that night. Oh no, wait a minute, what I actually thought was I can’t believe this is the top story in a newspaper.
The next morning before I arose from my pit that I call bed, I composed a tweet about said story and my thoughts about how it said more about the state of journalism in this country than it did about what the Shadow Home Secretary actually did.
Said tweet is embedded below:
The fact Diane Abbott has a can of mojito on a tube train bothers me not one jot. The fact it was the top story on The Sun online along with a former copper calling for her to be arrested for it does bother me a great deal. Is this really the journalism this country deserves?
— Neil Monnery (@neilmonnery) April 20, 2019
After I hit send, I went about my Saturday morning. Getting up, having a shower, cleaning my teeth, you know the bog standard normal Saturday morning stuff. I left my mobile phone on the floor by my bed blissfully unaware that it was starting to go off repeatedly with notifications.
It got to about half past eight when I finally picked up my phone but still I didn’t notice anything. Strolling downstairs I opened the patio door, took a camping chair into the garden and opened up my laptop to read the overnight news and sort out my fantasy baseball team.
As I opened said laptop, the last page I’d been looking at before closing it down the night before was apparently my TweetDeck. My notification block was streaming with updates. It was quite bewildering. In that hour to an hour and a half between writing the tweet and first seeing my TweetDeck, it had 81 likes. Crazy I thought.
Then as the morning progressed that stream became a torrent. By now I’d noticed and my phone was buzzing constantly next to me. 500 likes, 100 likes, 250 retweets and still going. Every so often someone that I recognised hit the RT button and the notifications would speed up even more. People were replying to my tweet at a far greater rate than I could even consider reading them, let alone reply to their replies.
Most people either wanted to tell me off for buying said newspaper (which I didn’t, the tweet expressively said I had read it online), lambast me for regarding it as journalism or just agreeing with me. A handful did contact me to tell me that laws are laws and she deserves to face further action from the authorities.
The thing that stood out though wasn’t the vast array of opinions but just how much time having a semi successful tweet could take out of you. It makes you appreciate what famous or at least semi famous people have to content with regarding social media. I chose not to interact because I had other things to do on Saturday and didn’t want to be tied to my tiny screen all day. Even by the early evening when the other half and myself went out for dinner, my phone was still beeping away at a rapid rate of knots.
Now I know I could’ve switched off all notifications from that tweet (well I know now…) but it was an interesting insight into how all-encompassing social media can be. Both on Saturday and Sunday nights the notifications were still coming in at a pace so I turned my phone on to silent so I wouldn’t get interrupted.
It is now Tuesday afternoon and my phone has stopped doing its thing. My tweet has been liked and retweeted out. My subsequent pithy comments are once more generally being ignored and rarely interacted with. Normality has returned but for one small moment in time, I wrote something that would appear on over half a million people’s timelines around the world. It wasn’t even that successful in the grand scheme of things but it once more it shows just how powerful this medium is.
If a nobody like me can have his bleary eyed Saturday morning thoughts shown in front of over half a million sets of eyes then imagine just how influential other people are. If that doesn’t scare you then I don’t know what will. The fact we are all exposed to the random thoughts and whims of oh so many people leads me to think this is why we are where we are today. With one third of young Americans apparently not convinced the Earth is round, with a President who lied his way to power, with the Leave campaign having lied their way to victory on the side of a bus. Truth and honesty doesn’t seem to have a place in the world of instant spin and murky truth.
Shit.
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