Trolling for Twitternuts

There is nothing funnier on Sunday night than watching who will fall for a piece of trollware (Oscars - Bah Humbug!). Here we have the Sunday Times having a go at Twitterers:

The Good:

“Tweets are really just a series of symbols,” says Lewis. “The person writing it just wants to be in the forefront of your mind, nothing more.” Which makes it very appealing to marketeers.

Jonathan Ross is a fan of Twitter for different reasons. He recently asked followers to nominate a word he could use in his Bafta script. He went with “salad” and dropped it in 45 minutes into the show. For him, using new technology confers status. [And helped his recent re-entry from disgrace in no small way]

“It makes us look young. And that is a high-status position in this society,” says de Botton.

The Bad (or at least somewhat pop-psychologically overblown)

For Alain de Botton, author of Status Anxiety and the forthcoming The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Twitter represents “a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. It’s like when a parent goes into a child’s room to check the child is still breathing. It is a giant baby monitor.”

Not so much Ambient Intimacy as Ambient Infatility - and then there is....

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.

Nor use email groups, nor, we presume, talk on the phone.....

The Ugly (as in OTT but with a grain of unpleasant truth):

“To ‘follow’ someone is to have a fantasy of who this person you’re following is, and you use it as a map reference or signpost to guide your own life because you are lost,” says James. “I would guess that the typical profile of a ‘follower’ is someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don’t have an inner life,” he says.

and.....

“The primary fantasy for most people is that we can be as connected as we were in the womb, a situation of total closeness,” says de Botton. “When people who are very close are talking, they ‘twitter away’: ‘It’s a bit dusty here’ or ‘There’s a squirrel in the garden.’ They don’t say, ‘What do you think of Descartes’s second treatise?’

and....

“We are the most narcissistic age ever,” agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

Much harrumphing in the Twitterverse of course - see this list here

Is the article a troll post, over the top and full of pop psychobabble - heck yes. Does it land a few telling shots - yup! Is my post trying to capitalise on it - of course not 0:-)

Big picture of course is that the Sunday Times would not have run a story like this, or the Grauniad one on the legal/libel aspects, if Twitter wasn't mainstreaming.

(Hat tip Drew Benvie for links to articles - seen on Twitter, of course)