Tweeting? It’s all so stupidly Twivial

COMEDIAN Dave Gorman has forged a rewarding career out of asking questions that are mischievously pertinent, or wickedly rhetorical.

In this consistently entertaining, if chaotically disorganised, book, Gorman turns his astute, observational wit on the rampant information age in which we live — and which leaves so many of us faintly bewildered so much of the time.

The internet and its all-conquering offspring Twitter and Facebook, smartphones, multichannel TV, advertising, the Press, even the small print on toilet roll packaging — all get ruthlessly and, sometimes, very funnily dissected.

As Gorman says, on any given day, he is probably fed 100 times more information than he was just ten years ago, yet he feels as if he is retaining 100 times less. Most of us can relate to that.

As an example of the absurdity of modern life, he cites a conversation he overheard in a supermarket on December 12, 2012: ‘Y’know it’s 12/12/12 today, doncha?’ said a man to his female companion. ‘Is it?’ she replied. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I saw it on Facebook.’

That’s the problem with the information age: in telling us how to behave, even what to think, it undermines initiative and comes perilously close to making automatons of us. It is a serious point, but he is right to approach it comically, because of the essential daftness of it all. For example, on a website called celebritytoob.

com he finds a list of ‘The 15 Coolest Facts About Richard Branson’. Number two is that Branson ‘dropped out of high school at age 16’. Does that even amount to a fact? muses Gorman. Isn’t 16 the age at which people do leave high school? ‘Only two facts into a 15-fact list,’ he observes, ‘and they are already failing the fundamental requirement of factiness.’

We have forgotten how to distinguish the utterly trivial f rom the even semi-interesting. Furthermore, we’re becoming worryingly captive to the sleek accessories of the information age.

Go to any pub or restaurant and it won’t be long before you see two people sharing a table, both tapping furiously on their phones — maybe even messaging each other.

So, Gorman has picked a big and, in some ways, an easy target. That’s probably why he approaches it as he might a stand-up comedy routine, lurching from topic to topic, seemingly as they occur, without any discernible structure. As a result, this is an easier book to dip into than to read cover to cover.

I particularly enjoyed his ruminations about Twitter — surely one of the strangest social phenomena of this or any time.

Gorman is disdainful of those ‘ TW’ words creeping into the language, such as the dreadful ‘twargument’ to denote a Twitter row. These words fetishise Twitter, he says, and make the medium more important than the message.

I couldn’t agree more, but then, I have a Twitter account, just as he does. That’s the other great irony of the new media revolution. If the first is that the information age has rendered us rather less well-informed than we used to be, the second is that those most alert to its dangers rely on it most. That’s certainly true of Gorman.

When I last looked, he’d made more than 54,000 tweets, and had well over 300,000 followers. Next to him, I am a novice, an apprentice . . . if he will forgive me, a veritable twainee.

Singer Katy Perry has the most Twitter followers in the world at more than 50 million