Thursday 1 May 2014

What I Found Out in a Day on Twitter

I've had a Twitter account for a while, but haven’t seriously used it.  However, yesterday I spent my first full day checking my account and monitoring tweets and this is what I discovered:

Platitudes Really Annoy Me.  
One of the accounts I follow posts platitudes about how great things are, positive quotes and is all about the silver lining.  I’d seen them before, but to see her send a new one every few minutes, I was impressed.  Well, by the end of the day I was impressed.  I started off the morning thinking “Awww, that’s nice”.  By lunchtime I was a bit fed up of having my feed jammed with so many uninteresting tweets.  By late afternoon I was sick of the fluffy, well-intentioned nonsense and even went to the person’s profile with every intention of unfollowing them.  But then I remembered why I had started to follow her in the first place and so I didn't hit the button.  Now, it is evening and all cynicism aside, I am seriously impressed.  That account tweets every few minutes all day, every day –impressive.  Even more impressive?  Who knew there were that many platitudes in the world and so far I haven’t seen a single one repeated.  Also, every now and then they’re broken up by a beautiful calming image of a waterfall or some other peaceful landscape or a message of gratitude and thankfulness.  This really isn't my kind of thing, but as there are 55,000 people following that account, there sure are a lot of people who enjoy it, so more power to them.

How Quickly You Learn Breaking News.
I found out Bob Hoskins had died even before any of the news sites, like the BBC had a chance to tweet about it or before any one of my Facebook friends had time to post one of those typical “Bob Hoskins Dead. So sad. RIP” messages.  This is truly astonishing for someone like me (the finding out so soon part...although Hoskins' death was very sad news).  When Nelson Mandela died I found out when I visited my sister and found a newspaper with a front page article about his funeral.  The newspaper was four days old.  If my sister had had her recycling pick up before that visit, I may have been oblivious to that news even now.

How Amusing and Bewildering the Topics which Trend Can Be
As the news about Bob Hoskins broke, of course his name shot to the top of the ‘Trends’ list, but it was closely followed by ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’.  Seriously?  It was a good hour before 'The Long Good Friday' showed up and I’m still waiting for 'Mona Lisa'.  I love Bob Hoskins but can't say I ever thought much of that bloody Roger Rabbit movie!  Anyway, I always preferred his normal accent than to a put on American one.

People Will Keep Tweeting About Nigel Farage and UKIP…
…even when they’re complaining about how much attention and coverage these two topics are garnering.  I believe that is a little thing we call irony out these ways.

It Can Be Quite Fun and Easy To Do!
I don’t know if I have it in me to be on Twitter all the time, not even just observing others, but I did enjoy it and found it is much easier to do than I had ever anticipated.  But I also realised that I am not ready to use Twitter via my phone.  I used the app for a few seconds before I had a full on panic attack because I was getting notifications and couldn't figure out how to sign out of it.  I calmed down and did manage to do just that and I think it may be a while before I venture back to Twitter via my phone.