Back in the early 1990s when I was working at a newspaper, I happened to be walking down the street towards the building one lunchtime when I caught up with the Managing Director. Now this man was a decent enough person and I had worked with him in various ways over the years so I knew him well. I asked him if there were any new projects on the horizon and he, detecting that I had some sort of idea, asked me what sort of thing was I thinking of.
You have to understand that at the time newspapers still had some chance of selling themselves to the area they served and all sorts of innovations -- not least was the introduction of 'new technology' that was intended to create a better product -- had changed the way we were. The market was shifting but it hadn't shifted entirely; I was appalled a year or two ago when I met up with one of the circulation people to hear my old paper was selling a third of what it was fifteen years earlier. Yes, we always knew the readership was dying off but they were deserting it in droves by then long before they got to the dying part.
Anyway, I said to the MD on that sunny lunch-hour that I wanted to put the paper on the internet. He smiled and said the internet was never going to take off but if I wanted to make a pitch, then go ahead and try. I made the pitch, he accepted and we assembled a small team of interested parties (all of who including me had other duties that needed our attention) in order to get the thing moving. It was rudimentary but as internet take up then was relatively small it represented a start.
By the time I left the newspaper the internet clearly was taking off despite all predictions of its early demise, and the department expanded. As always with big companies there were some politics involved, the hiring of excitable young Turks to run the web presence who it turned out knew very little about communication but liked redecorating offices and as my services were no longer required I moved on. My plan had been, naively it will seem now I suppose, to make people think better of the paper and make parts of it more accessible so they would want to buy the full thing. Times and views change however, and this new souped-up department of plush offices was to spawn its own monster, and good luck to them and all who sail in the floundering ship of traditional media today.
Over the next few years not only did the internet expand despite theories it wouldn't last (remember, they said that about television and the car, too) but the web became everything to all men and women. It also brought into being a new phenomenon, known as 'social media.' In one fell swoop it became the hottest thing around, because everyone has an opinion and this was the perfect way to express it to, well, everyone.
I admit that while when starting my company's website I did wonder about a sort of online auction but I hadn't the skill to do it alone. Nor could I even begin to imagine anything as big as eBay, nor for that matter did I want to think of anything that might distract from our own classified ad columns.
I also had no idea, not at that stage, that people wanted to express opinions in droves. I am not sure when we posted a news story I could see a sort of 'Letters to the Editor' on it being an essential part of the package. But hey, I was a mere designer, not a Zuckerberg. In other words, back then I had no idea social media would become so important to the world.
It did, and then some.
I make no bones about it: I do the social media thing too and you are looking at my own opinion here on this blog. I am not so silly as to think this is in anyway groundbreaking. It's one of zillions, that's all. They say opinions are like arseholes, because everyone has one. So, here's my arsehole (in the nicest possible way)
So we have people, via Facebook and Twitter, dashing off instant opinions (or exposing arseholes, if you prefer) and I use Twitter as I find Facebook irritating beyond belief. But, each to their own. Times, as I say change, and I am aware what is 'big' today may be a lot smaller tomorrow, and so on.
Now I tend to use Twitter as a sort of news aggregator; imperfect and probably lightweight but quick and it arrives on my desk or iPad and will alert me to some things I didn't know were happening. I am slightly wary of it however and I can see it can be a trap for the foolish. I also don't follow 'celebs' as I can't think of many who excite me to look into their life. I ask actors to act, comedians to make me laugh, musicians to entertain me but when they leave the set or stage they are free to take their life with them. I really don't need to know what they had for lunch yesterday.
Apparently many people do need to know and they follow entertainers in droves. More than that they share the menu and even comment on it. I imagine it makes a jester feel so much better that people eagerly pass on the news of what a joke teller had with his or hear steak and chips, and better still when people respond with: "Mmmm, wonderful! I love your taste!"
None of this is for me (I admit I did follow one female comedian who didn't make me smile much but when she promoted the death of Margaret Thatcher as a cause for joy though not having the same view about the demise of some rancid left-wing tyrant, I happily stopped following her) but then I did meet the full force of social media one day.
I am now wiser by far about what a waste of space it is. It was of course my fault: I commented on someone's post about a very popular comedian. It was along the lines (only two lines, as it is a limited number of characters on Twitter) that this joker -- and he is quite funny at times -- was in my view happy to express a strong and generally negative view on all religions bar one.
No, I didn't mention which one gets the free pass and I won't mention it here. But what did happen was I became engulfed in a small whirlwind of hate and abuse from some of this man's many followers. Having commented to another person, the original poster found it necessary to pass on my comment (though frankly it wasn't either amazing information or even a great insight) and inevitably one or two of his followers also followed the aforementioned jester. For reasons beyond my understanding my relatively bland comment (it contained no form of hatred and not even any criticism of his joke telling) was tweeted to this comedian's timeline and thus to tens of thousands of his itchy, twitchy adorers.
Cue the shit storm.
My timeline was swiftly filled with some astonishing stuff. I was accused of many things and given many classifications (don't you love by the way we live in the age of non-judgemental non-labelling but somehow we are still judged and labelled by the non-judgers?) and lots of things assumed about me that this comedian's followers imagined constituted my whole outlook. I had to smile how I was both one thing and another in the same breath, how they knew me and didn't want to know me. I was dismissed and reviled and even told that the comedian had a lot more followers than me so that proved I was a twat, or something like it.
More, I was involved (though not at my request) in fierce discussions between others over spin-off topics and I was not clear whether I was the subject of this, was being labelled or merely included so that I might appreciate their stunning insight into life. I was sort of dragged into Twitter-short arguments between two or more people as if I cared.
I didn't, but no one asked me.
I can see this jester's fans felt the need to rally to the man's defence. I can see that fawning over someone needs an expression of how willingly they fawn. I can even see that if you think someone is great you need to shore up that greatness and even the tiniest chip in the edifice is not acceptable.
But this was social media here. An hour or two later the storm subsided. By the next day I was history. I'd had my fifteen minutes of fame and was irrelevant now. Many people were happy they understood just where I was 'coming from.' People I had never met now knew me and either hated me because of it or maybe bore a grudging admiration I was this, that or the other.
Was I a christian, or an atheist? Was I a human being or some pond-based low-life? Did I hate this jester or hate his followers more? I may not know myself, but the social media clearly did.
The lesson of all this is obvious. Don't make comments on anything related to a celebrity unless you want to be judged, chewed up and spat out. In the end, it really isn't worth finding out the type of person who is being 'social' on things like Twitter.
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