Vomiting On Twitter Potential

Following on from various blog entries I've written concerning commercial interests stealing in on the marketing potential of social networking, I thought I should share the following thoughts from Stephen Fry when he was guest on a recent episode of 'The Infinite Monkey Cage' on Radio 4.  Fry began by describing how his Twitter account became more and more popular, going from just a few hundred followers to a lot more...

...suddenly the numbers got bigger, and the requests that started coming in from charities and good causes for me to re-tweet this and re-tweet that, got enormous, so one felt one had a social responsibility.  For me the whole point of being on Twitter is that it's me, it 's not a corporate thing, I'm not a public service, I'm not a broadcasting station, I can sometimes be drunk or annoyed and tweet something stupid and I might apologise, put my hand up... But as far as the wider world is, I mean I've noticed two years after Twitter became something of a phenomenon, I would get these requests to address businesses with hideous titles like 'How To Harness Your Twitter Potential' and I just wanted to vomit all over them because  it struck me that it ignored the one point of Twitter which is, bizarrely small as a tweet is - 140 characters - people can read bullshit in it straightaway. They know when they're being preached to, they know when they're being sold to, and in the end all this social science is fascinating as science, but it's hardly peer science because it's really all about politics and money.  The people who really want to plug into this kind of science are politicians  - who want to know how to persuade us one way, and people who want to persuade us how to buy one way. There has to be a countervaling, open nature to this science which tells us what's going on and allows us to retain our free will and while we may be part of  migratory patterns or any other kind of pattern we also have within us the ability to say "no, I'm not going to be one of those, I shall not do this because I know I'm being pushed by someone who thinks they understand how the human works"  - inside there's the individual human heart and the individual brain and it's better than any system we can devise or an idealogy around it.

You can hear this episode (from June 6th 2011) and others here.