A Recent Convert to Twitter

 Twitter has a lot to answer for – it makes screeching dervishes of the most sane individuals. I realised this when an erstwhile friend whom I thought the very epitome of rationality used his Twitter account to release bitter diatribes against public figures. One of the reasons this blog doesn’t cover current affairs is that you are expected to take sides (with a bipolar choice) and I find that reality is too complex for such simplification.

But I found myself enrolling on Twitter a few months ago and am actually enjoying the experience – for two reasons.

First, it forces you to be brief. My posts tend to be both long and complex. A couple of years ago, the blog started to use tables which I found a very useful discipline forcing me to summarise what I was trying to say in a couple of sentences, And Twitter gives that same discipline. So far I’ve only seen Ian Leslie recognise this positive feature. And it is, of course, only a potential – which requires skill and experience to develop. But brevity is, of course, something to be encouraged in all writers – as this blog has emphasised in recent years.

 

But there is a second, equally powerful reason which may smack to some of the “echo-chamber” argument of which social media is (justifiably) accused. By blocking the rubbish which assails us when we start to use Twitter, I’ve found amazing new worlds opening up to me Of course I have a few of the same websites I have long known about - but they’re feeding me with new material. And as I select the first few individuals to “follow”, I’m alerted to others who don’t have blogs but have a book to market and interesting comments to make.

And it can also help improve my French and German – I can follow journalists from those countries and get a much better sense of what’s going on there than sticking within the Anglosphere eg https://twitter.com/carstenknop

And virtually all of is positive – it’s referring to books, articles and discussions which are considered worthwhile. This I hadn’t expected. I had been put off Twitter because of the level of outright venom it seemed to encourage. But here are thousands of twitter users who are using the platform to point us to a healthy world.

It just needs us to make the right choices.