Oh dear. It’s that time of the month again. Someone’s come along and rattled my cage and I’m well and truly fucked off again.
I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. Actually, no. I have a love/love relationship with Twitter. It’s fun! It’s an excellent communication tool! I’ve gained insight into the lives of people in real time. This particularly relates to celebrities. Without the joy of Twitter, I wouldn’t be able to experience those little buzzing moments when a Real Life Celebrity says something really stupid and then the better bit where they come back and say ‘Oh God, I’m really thick sometimes, aren’t I?’ and you think ‘Yes! Yes you are! Really, you’re just like me! But more people know your name!’ And I have to admit, I kind of like those moments. Previously I had to rely on dry old edited autobiographies.
Twitter. They keep bringing out lists of the most influential Tweeters, but in reality, it’s a great leveller.
And it’s so accessible! I’ve been able to send ‘Good Luck!’ and ‘You’re Brilliant!’ messages to people who never knew I existed before! And they still don’t! Because those messages come at them in wave after wave of thousands of other people saying exactly the same thing! But I’ll send them anyway, because there is this tiny part of my heart that likes to imagine one of them clicking on their ‘mentions’ feed at the exact moment that I’ve sent it and there’s a tiny moment of them knowing I exist and thinking ‘Aw thanks, LittlePippin76!’
And I have been responded to by a Real Life Celebrity! He’s been on television and everything! @JohnFinnemore, comedian and writer. He’s really funny, and I enjoy following his tweets. I once said something benign such as ‘I really like your show! Gibber! Fangirl! I promise I'm not psycho!’ or words that said a similar thing, and he responded with something not dissimilar to ‘Thanks!’ It’s like we’re friends now!
There are, however, less good aspects of Twitter.
One big problem is that you get 140 characters, including spaces. That’s it. It’s a great way of learning to be less wordy (obviously, I haven’t learned this yet), but it’s also really restrictive in terms of tone and clarification. Sometimes someone will ask a relatively complex question and I find I can’t answer it in short-form text. If I think the question really needs an answer, I’ll send two or three tweets but I always feel as though I’m cheating a little bit.
And it’s so much easier for someone to jump on the bandwagon of ‘Yeah, X is awful! They should be burned to death!’ than it is to post a reasoned, well-argued, justification or defence of X for doing whatever they did that seemed to disproportionally upset so many people. So X might pop in, check their mentions, and be subject to a stream of vicious abuse about their character, often based on one small action, and not only do they have very little recourse, but they’ll probably have very few obvious supporters.
And not only do you only get just 140 characters, but those 140 characters pop up in the middle of people’s stream, and you have no idea what else they’re looking at when your Tweet arrives. Consequently, they may look at what you wrote, but the tone doesn’t come across at all.
Take my good friend (seriously, we’re that close) John Finnemore. Last Wednesday, he tweeted this:
‘Didn’t know that: half of all blackbirds are brown. They must always have been standing with the black half facing me.’
Now, I consider myself to be reasonably bright, and I know this is the kind of gentle humour that Finnemore does so well, and it’s the sort of humour I love him for, so you’d think I’d get the joke without too much of a problem.
Alas, my Stream at that point on that Wednesday was full of:
ANGRY NEWS RE SYRIA!
ANGRY NEWS ABOUT POLITICIANS!
Fact about blackbirds by a comedian.
ANGRY NEWS ABOUT STRIKES!
NEWS FROM PMQT!
PRO-STRIKE POST!
MORE ANGRY NEWS ON SYRIA!
So my mind, being stuck on anger and angst, read the Tweet and thought ‘Oh, better put my close friend John Finnemore right about brown blackbirds being female… wouldn’t want him to embarrass himself!’ and I quickly sent a reply tweet off to him, which would show up in his mentions feed.
And then, ten minutes later, my brain screeched to a halt and started up with ‘Pip! It was a fucking joke! By a comedian! You fucking fuckwit! It’s was a JOKE! Now John Finnemore will think you’re a total fucking loser and he’ll never, ever speak to you again! You imbecile!’ and I rushed back to Twitter in a panic to delete the offending Tweet. Just for good measure, I tweeted him again to apologise for the Tweet that was deleted anyway, and pointed out that I was a fuckwit, and that I was very remorseful about my fuckwittery.
The thing is, John Finnemore had 140 characters to make a joke at a point when my brain was embedded in politics. If he’d have posted the same Tweet on a Friday, when my brain’s all but given up anyway, and when @WeAreFact is Tweeting extremely funny Tweets all day, then I’d probably have got the joke straight away.
But my point is, 140 characters is a very small amount of space to get your point across, even when your point is similar to every other point you’ve ever made and the person reading it knows the sort of thing you’re likely to say.
Even with all this, I still kind of love Twitter. I like the fact that I can voyeuristically follow people (who, to be fair, seem quite happy with people voyeuristically following every thought they put on the Internet). Every couple of weeks I unfollow a couple of celebrities who I’ve grown tired of, and pick up a different couple based on recommendations and my mood. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up the feed of one @FleetStreetFox because someone else re-tweeted something funny that she’d said. She tweeted updates on her drunken evening and I found it funny, so she stayed on my feed.
A couple of times she said something that I didn’t quite agree with, but whatever, sometimes I say things that I don’t agree with so I’m fine with that. She Tweets under a disguise, but she’s open about the fact that she’s a reporter for a Tabloid Newspaper. She keeps a blog too and I’ve read that from time to time. Again, she occasionally says things that I disagree with, but I considered her worth reading.
Last week she joined in with a Twitter Witch-hunt against Johann Hari, a reporter I’d always respected. Hari plagiarised another journalist (my respect for him is dwindling massively) but the smug joy that FleetStreetFox displayed in her Tweets about him was slightly nauseating. But again, whatever, I don’t know her, I don’t know if he’s upset her in some other life I don’t know about. I don’t think it’s very nice behaviour, but then, neither is plagiarism, so whatever. I didn’t have any major issue with her.
Until today.
Today, at about five o’clock, my Stream picked up the following news article:
Now, I think anyone’s immediate reaction to this story could be nothing other than shock, shame, and the deepest sympathy for the Dowler family. There is surely nothing more to be said?
FleetStreetFox didn’t think so. Her feed almost immediately started commenting in the most peculiar and frankly inhuman Tweets about the incident.
‘Appalling if true Milly Dowler's phone hacked. We've seen no evidence yet though - and in 2002, the time it is suppose to have happened...’
Yes, yes indeed it is appalling. It’s true, we ought not to judge until we’ve seen evidence. It is the sort of thing that the News of the World has been found guilty of doing of late, but even so, let’s see the evidence first. And FleetStreetFox seems to be struggling with the 140 limit, so let’s see how she was going to end that, shall we?
‘... that sort of thing was common. It only really stopped (in most places) after 2003 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.’
Oh. OK. It’s the sort of thing that happened everywhere, so the NotW might have been mistaken for thinking that hacking into a missing 13 year-old’s phone was OK!’ Really? Is it not just obvious that you really shouldn’t do that sort of thing? In addition, they deleted messages from her voicemail box so that more people could call and leave messages, presumably, so that they’d have more things to print in their newspaper.
‘Not that I'm excusing it - phone hacking can be justified in some cases, but never of a schoolgirl in the days after she's gone missing.’
Good. That’s clear, she doesn’t condone or excuse it. In this case. In other cases, it’s apparently fair play that people are afforded no privacy.
‘Whoever made that decision at the News of the World should be named and shamed. Difficult to charge under a 2003 act for a 2002 offence.’
So the person in question should be punished. But there was no current crime to punish them for. That’s a shame isn’t it.
‘I'm no lawyer but I think it would be hard to prove perversion of the cause of justice unless a deleted voicemail led to Levi Bellfield...’
Once again, let’s try to list all the ways in which the NotW hasn’t really done anything that’s worth punishing.
And it seems the NOTW told the police they'd accessed the messages - that would make it harder for a prosecution to stick. Remember too...
More suggestions that we shouldn’t start hating the News of the World and their vile shittyness. Remember, they’re not as shitty as they could be!
And she’s run out of space again. And with the next tweet my opinion of FleetStreetFox changed from thinking ‘annoying, sometimes idiotic, not someone I like, but generally harmless,’ to ‘a vile specimen of humanity who is frankly not worth the air that she breathes.’
‘... that Bob Dowler lied to police for a few days. However understandable his reasons, it was wrong and led the inquiry astray.’
What The Fuck? Seriously? She’s seriously comparing the actions of a Father, terrified for his child, to that of the evil bastards of the Tabloids who are only interested in selling stories. Seriously?
Actually, it’s happened again. My brain has broken with shock. I’ve run out of words to express how vile this is. I’m shaking with rage.
FleetStreetFox, again, without the character space to express herself entirely, goes on to clarify and justify her position on this.
‘Trespass, theft, speeding offences, impersonating people - I have done and will do any and all of these things if the story justifies it.’
‘I've never hacked a phone, but I would if I thought I needed to, and I'll happily stand in front of a jury and tell them why’.
‘The problem for the journalists involved in Hackgate is its not justified for a C-list shagging story. And certainly not for Milly Dowler.’
No. The problem for the journalists involved in Hackgate is that the tabloid culture has grown to the point that anything is acceptable for ‘The Story’. And if ‘The Story’ warrants it, you can break the law, you can trample over people, you can stand in the way of justice and this should all be acceptable, and you shouldn’t have to apologise for it. The problem for the journalists involved in Hackgate is that they have spent so much time reporting on the rotten side of humanity, they’ve leapt in and become a part of it. They’ve fed it and sustained it.
I don’t buy the whole ‘We only write what the public wants to read! Look at our circulation figures!’ No. you created the monster! If you want to destroy it, stop feeding it!
But you don’t want to, do you? Because your sales and your income is more important to you than the society in which you live. It’s better for you if it is inhuman. So you’ll keep feeding it until you turn into this.
FleetStreetFox has many, many followers (one fewer from today), but just for good measure she retweeted the following from one of her loyal supporters.
by fleetstreetfox
‘Feel for everyone working at #NOTW who didn't hack a missing girl's phone, i.e. 99%. Not fun on the inside when something like this breaks.’
I’m sorry? What? Are you out of your tiny mind? Today, on this day, when the Dowler family have been put through several weeks of extra hell on top of the nine years of hell they’ve already experienced, you ask us to give sympathy to the tabloid journalists?
Seriously?
Fuck that.
I’m extremely pleased that I have never in my life bought a Tabloid newspaper. Unfortunately, that leaves me with nothing to boycott at this time. Because no, I don’t feel sorry for the Tabloids, or any of their journalists. In fact, if the tabloid offices all burned to the ground tonight, and there were no more of the shit-rags printed from this day forth, I think that the world would be a little brighter and little more pleasant. And I don’t give a flying fuck about the poor, poor journalists who would be out of work because of it.
I can unfollow bloody FleetStreetFox though, because I would personally like to go through the rest of my life never reading another word that pours out of her evil and poisonous mind.
Pip xxx
