A good friend of mine, who doesn’t talk to me, or telephone me, or ask what I’m up to or if I fancy a beer anymore, e-mailed me last minute to say she’s on Twitter and that I should ‘follow’ her. She added that she’d be on Facebook if I ever needed to get hold of her in an emergency, and asked why I wasn’t her friend yet, even though I thought we’d been friends since we started school together, on the same day in 1970…
Anyway, I thought why not? Get with the program Dave, you’ll be left behind soon you cyber dinosaur you!
So I tried this Twitter thing.
I signed up and waited.
Nothing happened.
So I sent a text (one of only 3 this year btw) to my oldest, best friend (pending) to ask how it all worked and when I could hope to start reaping the benefits and all.
She replied instantly (almost before I’d hit ‘send’ in fact).
‘Doh! U hv 2 fllw peeps mun butt! *%$£” – hehe, Lol.’
‘Try Fry.’
So I did. I started to search for and follow all the ‘Dave Lewis’s’ I could find.
There were a lot.
I found full-time playboys, semi-nude classical yard gnome repairmen, filmmakers, musicians, Iron Maiden-loving civil servants, glass blowers, erotic nude photographers, Great Fathers / Decent Husbands, Semi-Pro Golfers, Youth Wrestling/Baseball Coaches, Proudly Serving America, and Blessed With the Best Friends a Man Could Have, Independent thinkers, Transcendental Meditation Center Yogi’s, truckers, rugby players, Lovers of music, films, Sopranos, football, Branston pickle, 24, Family Guy, scampi, Tang Soo Do and its related art Tai Chi, Editors of the TARDIS Newsroom and a U.S. Senate staffer. I didn’t follow the god botherers, businessmen or marketers (seemed a bit pointless), but I did follow a lot of me’s.
I waited.
Nothing.
Despondent now, I walked (using my legs) down the pub.
I entered, and discovered the place was heaving with single people (all engrossed in iPhone masturbation), couples sat across the table from each other (sending texts to people who weren’t there, but should be, ‘cos they were missing such a great time), gangs of girls (all tarted-up in their best texting outfits, implements charged and waving like dildos), in between sips and snarls at the gangs of boys, all tooled up in SuperDry & Hollister, text (ing?) wireless members of the faction for reinforcements.
Occasionally, a boy, or a girl, or a robot, would glance my way, and undress me of my t-shirt from Zanzibar, project violence into my smiling eyes. The eyes that filled with tears as the sun rose over that temple in the jungle, the eyes that gaped wide at those elephants in musth, the eyes I rubbed salt from when the dolphins and turtles outswam me, and the eyes that nearly went snow-blind on the equator, up that volcano.
I log on again, Sunday morning, with a sore head, think it’s alcohol-related, this hollow feeling lurking in my stomach.
Still waiting.
Still nothing.
Except offers to be someone else. Read about them. Connect with them. Find out about them. What they’re doing. How well they’re doing.
The me’s I’ll never know exist.
And I press the ‘Back’ button to the girl I stood next to. At the hot bar, with the hot pants.
I smiled and asked her if she came here often. She spat out her reply with the venom of a cobra (I saw once in Tanzania) and was gone, all too satisfied, she had logged off, momentarily, disconnected from her network, risked the downtime, to push between me and a DriftKing to order her shots.
‘Get a life granddad!’ she’d mispronounced, confusing textspeak with real speak.
I had to withdraw my puppy dog eyes. Go home, log on, search for that life.
That life I’ve been wasting up to now.
Are you following me yet? Cos if you were I expect we would have chatted by now.
Here’s how it works.
1. You follow people who might be suitable friends.
Think of it as a cocktail party full of strangers. You sidle up to the likely looking ones – listen in on what they are saying (best way to do this on twitter is to click on their profile and read a whole bunch of their tweets in one go) and if they are talking nicely about things you can chat about – you introduce yourself.
2. You tweet to the person you have just followed and introduce yourself.
You say why you followed them in a witty friendly manner & mention something you both have in common. 9/10 if you’ve picked someone who you saw chats to people (are there plenty of tweets in their stream beginning with @somebody’s name – or are they all just announcements like press releases?) they will reply and follow you back. Even if they don’t follow you back you can still chat with them by clicking on the reply button to something they’ve said.
3.You look for twitter communities you might fit in with. These are gathered around hashtags. Think of a good hashtag as a watercooler in an office corridor. People congregate and chat about common interests.
For you I would recommend #writer #poetry #onestoppoetry #amwriting #litchat Look for these hashtags in the search box – you will find people you have much in common with. Talk to them. Don’t just follow them. Use the hashtags in your own tweets as long as they are relevant.
4. Nothing will happen if you just follow people. In real life that is the same – except if you get noticed folllowing people in real life you might get arrested.
5.If you follow me and tweet me – I’ll help if you like. Twitter is BRILLIANT – how could it not be? It is full of people and people are fascinating, amazing and there is so much to learn.
P.S. I posted this comment first under the wrong blog post (the Haiku one please delete it from there). Sorry.
PPS I like your use of words and imagery – you are definitely somebody I could learn from.
Hi Michele
Yeh, I know how it works, it’s just my take on the “me, me, me” culture it promotes.
Cheers Dave
I don’t go to cocktail parties any more – for alas! I have lost the art of “sidling up to…”
Great poem, I’ve tweeted for you…lol
Ta B
Oh, cynical you, but so true. Brilliantly written
I swear my daughter is surgically attached to her iphone, and she has more friends on facebook than a person could possibly give quality attention to in one lifetime. She’s not gone down the Twitter route on the grounds that her comments are too personal to go so public – although with so many so-called friends on facebook, that’s what I see as going public.
I believe in a generation or so, most people are going to lose the art of face-to-face communication with true friends, as many have already.
Thanks very much Sarah, I agree.