Going off line without a backward glance – tweet charity case
IHAVE ceased tweeting...It is not as though I was ever a major paid up, committed, active, truly engaged member of the twitterati. No Donald Trump am I, lying awake in the early hours, phone in hand, pondering how to shock the world, how to keep the focus of global attention on me and my orange quiff. No self- promoting actor, singer, or general celebrity am I, forever keen to remind the public of my existence, terrified of being forgotten and overlooked. I have no product to sell nor philosophy to spread, no jokes to share nor message to peddle.
I have never gone viral, never trended, never had thousands waiting for me to share my thoughts. Humorist Stephen Fry has more than 12 million followers hanging on his every key-stroke while the sloe-eyed Kim Kardashian has 59 million. Before logging out for good, I see that I have precisely 161 followers on Twitter, so I am clearly no internet Messiah.
The time has come to call a halt and I shall be missed. The last message I posted was back in March when I put out the following plea: ‘Who got all the goals please??’.Then I departed, never to return. Nine months on, I cannot remember which sporting event prompted the plaintive query about goal-scorers, nor even which sporting code was involved.
Frankly, much of my disillusionment with Twitter stems from inability to deliver shafts of comedy or wisdom in the short format. I envy those who can churn out ready-made quotations and side-splitting one-liners. My favourite tweeter, Canadian singer/songwriter Ron Sexsmith routinely launches the most gloriously ghastly puns into cyberspace. Here are a few examples of Sexsmith wordplay:
‘People who mend holes in socks say the darn-dest things.’ ‘Doing a photo shoot makes me feel like Canon fodder.’ ‘Before God created the oceans, it was long time no sea.’
‘ That time you saw me in my swim suit I was scared shirtless.’ ‘I auditioned for the role of Santa Claus once but they said I didn’t have enough on screen presents.’
And so it goes on and on and on, often several times a day, turning simple phrases inside out and upside down in no more than 20 well-chosen words. Ron’s subversive and occasionally childish side does not seep into his tightly crafted songs, which benefit from a more measured brilliance. I am all set to stick with his albums but cut myself off from the puns – bye-bye Twitter.
The break-up has been formalised by a change of mobile phone which dictates that I must go through the palaver of logging in once more if I wish to stay in touch with the tweets. Frankly, I could not be bothered, not even in the hope of finding Ron Sexsmith giving some unfortunate cliché a mauling. I have forgotten both my Twitter handle and my password, and it is too much effort to retrieve them or to re-invent myself under another identity.
I leave without saying goodbye to those 161 trusty souls who remain in my flock but feel sure that they will not mourn (or notice) my departure. Facebook may be next to go as I fear that I am not playing fair with my ‘friends’ either. Though I sporadically put up a picture of me and my own-grown parsnips or of me petting The Pooch, it is a one-way street - I almost never check the Facebook news feed to find out how little Ingrid’s christening went or to share the latest Brexit cartoon.
While I prefer to read an improving novel last thing at night, dear Hermione often brings Facebook to bed. She sends herself to sleep by scrolling through snippets from other people’s lives mixed with scurrilous commentary on current affairs. She may dig me in the ribs and alert me to anything that I will be missing if I log off for good.
Our offspring are so wedded to the internet and all its apps that they seem to have forgotten that their phones may also be used to make calls. Their father, on the other hand, is reaching the time in his life when he does not feel the need to be in constant touch with alleged friends and so-called followers. I shall make the break.
As Shakespeare might have put it, parting is such tweet sorrow.