All A-Twitter

Posted by Verity on December 6, 2021 in Blog, Consumer issues, Covid-19, Leisure activities, Living today, Pandemic, society, Technology | 2 comments

Damesnet received a tweet a few days ago congratulating us on the anniversary of our joining Twitter in November 2014. Well, technically I suppose it was, though it took us a year to summon up the courage and the technical knowhow to start tweeting. I say ‘courage’, because we were convinced that the minute we stuck our heads above the parapet, the trolls would be down on us like a ton of bricks. (I do love a cliché, don’t you?)

But it’s all good – they don’t even know we’re there! And that goes for most people. It’s taken us six years to build up to c.930 followers, whereas I note with rage that Carve Her Name, mere Twitter babies who joined in 2017, have over 3,000. Is it because we is old? (Not that I begrudge CHN – they too are promoting overlooked women and do some great stuff.)

I suspect it’s because we never follow the advice to go niche and focus on one specific constituency. But where’s the fun in that? Also, which particular niche? Trying to second-guess which particular tweets will be popular is almost impossible. You can discover a fabulous, hitherto undiscovered dame with a killer quote to her name, only to find that she sinks without a trace.

Not so in the case of Angela Brazil, purveyor of jolly-hockey-sticks fiction for girls, who elicited 16 re-tweets and 58 likes. Really? And there’s me thinking that we might provoke a mild trickle of accusations that somewhere in her books she was racist/classist/sexist – I’ve no doubt a trawl through her pages would yield some examples.

It’s actually the sense of connectedness that makes tweeting rewarding – the gradual opening up of a dialogue with regular tweeters of illuminating material or resonant comments. I felt that all the toiling in the wilderness was worthwhile when damesnet put the deputy director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in touch with a London schoolgirl on a coaching scheme for disadvantaged pupils so that she could take up an internment opportunity at the gallery.

I’m aware that we see very little of the bile spewed out over Twitter. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be at the receiving end of the sort of vile misogynistic abuse meted out to Greta Thunberg – much of which is evidence of faults in our society that exist independently, but are magnified by the Twittersphere. But on the other side of the equation is the indefatigable campaigning feeds of groups like the Good Law Project and Led By Donkeys, making sure we never lose sight of the high crimes and misdemeanours of this government.

Finally, among all the dross, there is some truly sparkling wit out there. The nerdy pleasure of watching University Challenge has, for me, only been amplified by #universitychallenge, where, alongside the boasts/laments about how many answers people have got, there is laugh-out-loud commentary on the programme and its contestants (yet all surprisingly good-natured: it must be well moderated), rich with cultural references and unexpected connections. (Who knew that Jeremy Paxman now looks like Postman Pat?)

I leave you with one of the best Covid tweets, posted early in the pandemic: a photo of Chinese doctors arriving at Heathrow to share the benefit of their experience with the NHS, captioned ‘They come over here, healing our yobs!’