Last year I gave up Twitter for Lent. This was a forfeit of limited sacrifice. A bit like a Vegan forswearing bacon. A year ago I scarcely used the world’s most influential social media tool. But now that benign-looking blue bird has got its claws into me. Oh for a digital cilice – to prick my conscience every time I reach for my smartphone and another piccolo dopamine hit.
For the longest time I was a Twitter denier.
As a journalist I was surrounded by early adopters. But the idea of crunching a thought, a story, an opinion with such reductive laconicism – seemed like a repudiation of everything I’d gone into journalism to achieve. Here was a medium which actively shunned complexity. Yes, I could appreciate the beauty of brevity. There is a certain sub-editor’s art at work in some of the best-crafted tweets. But in a world in need of nuance, Twitter appeared to be an enemy of understanding.
Working in media brings certain responsibilities. The least-recognised is probably the notion that a journalist of a certain age takes a professional risk in looking too much like a dinosaur. This isn’t about standards or ethics. It is a function of office politics. Start to look too long in the tooth to embrace new technology and you run the risk of being replaced with somebody who can.
[T]he idea of crunching a thought, a story, an opinion with such reductive laconicism – seemed like a repudiation of everything I’d gone into journalism to achieve.
My concession to that fear of firing was to blog. For three years, up to 2010, I wrote one for the Sky News website, which was then a clunky version of today’s highly-polished, much-visited incarnation. My blog was called ‘Family Matters’ and, as the title suggests, it was a vehicle for me to explore aspects of family life and policy. It allowed me to say things impossible to utter on television. Though it wasn’t an overtly Catholic column, the blog was shot-through with my faith.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Sky tolerated my ramblings.
Then again, all that was before the culture wars really ignited in Britain and, it has to be said, before my employer decided it had to take a position on aspects of identity politics (as it now does). I enjoyed the freedom to write for a growing digital audience and increasingly pushed the boundaries.
One blog backfired.
It was about the disproportionate impact of so-called ‘problem families’ on council estates. My tongue-in-cheek solution – to move them to an offshore island – was picked up by an outraged Evening Standard. I had to issue a clarification, but no more than that. I’d taken the necessary precaution of getting the column approved by my editor.
[I]n a world in need of nuance, Twitter appeared to be an enemy of understanding.
The blogs were canned by Sky not longer after. I doubt it had anything to do with my brief brush with polemical notoriety. The company seemed conscious of tidying-up the noisier parts of its news operation. Three years of weekly blogs by a dozen correspondents, myself included, were expunged overnight. You can’t even find them now in an archive.
Meanwhile Twitter was growing in influence. I remember being told in Rome ahead of the conclave which elected Pope Francis, that it was the best way to find things out about briefings, Vatican statements, even ‘the mood of the faithful’.
I took the plunge in 2014 and pottered along with occasional posts, often linking them to what I hoped were more thoughtful articles I’d written elsewhere. My approach was deliberately vanilla. Avoid controversy. I was also conscious that my values were increasingly not those of my employer, which had a muting effect.
That all changed last month when I finally resigned from Sky. Weeks of ‘gardening leave’ unrolled before me and a chance to write a bit. Ecumenical stuff. I’m especially proud of an essay published in the Jewish Chronicle a fortnight ago about the benefits of larger families. But I’ve also found myself being sucked into the Twitter maelstrom.
My number of followers is modest, but has doubled in a month. That increase reflects my emergence from the chrysalis. I’ve said things, for instance about the Oprah interview, I wouldn’t dare have said while at Sky. Such freedom is a perk of quitting rather than holding out for redundancy and the gag that goes with the cheque.
The numbers may be up (and let’s be clear – ‘followers’ are a currency of sorts), but so is the incidence of bile. I looked at my Twitter ‘feed’ this morning to see that a complete stranger had called me a liar. Slurs which not long ago would’ve had someone reaching for their duelling pistols are now comparatively tame.
Does the vileness have an impact? I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t make my spirits lift. I do know I’m looking at my Twitter feed too often. Addiction? My brain being rewired by the craving for ticks?
I don’t know.
I tell myself it’s a vocational obligation. But is it really? Isn’t it just a little bit about affirmation? I do know that, when a friend — a Mancunian Catholic of the old-school — sent me an animated film by Steve Cutts last week it moved me to tears. It shows a dystopia where everyone is looking at their phones. Actually, it looked rather like the world we live in.
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