Grace Dent: 100 things about me and Twitter

When the writer joined the social network three years ago, she used it to share random thoughts about TV and life. Since then, she has become a Twitter addict. In an extract from her new book, she explains what she loves – and hates – about it 1. My name is @gracedent . 2. I joined Twitter on 4 June 2008. 3. @febake was the first person to tell me about Twitter. It took him several months of preaching about its wonders until I cracked. 4. My first ever tweet was: “looking puzzled at twitter.” No one replied. I mooched off into cyberspace, humiliated. 5. I returned in early 2009 because my friend @heawood joined. 6. We swapped twitpics of bears in Victorian bonnets and insults about body hair issues. I dumped all my surplus silly thoughts there about EastEnders, Big Brother and columns I couldn’t be bothered to write. 7. By July 2009 I had about 5,987 followers. 8. Back then I said pretty much whatever I wanted on Twitter. It was like spraying rude words on a fence in neon, foot-high letters and never, ever getting detention for it. 9. Today on Twitter I feel like a slightly feral village elder. My teeth itch when people tweet me to tell me what I’m not allowed to say. 10. When @heawood moved to LA to interview movie stars, we kept in touch mainly via Twitter. I missed her so much I tweeted her YouTube links of sad songs. 11. Maudlin soft-rock ballad So Far Away by Dire Straits was most effective. @heawood now lives back in London. 12 . I check Twitter on my iPhone each day within five minutes of opening my eyes. 13 . I have woken myself up in the middle of the night checking Twitter in my sleep. 14. I think I can tell if you are fibbing about being on Twitter within one minute of talking to you. 15. I think I can tell if a person has enough “voice” to write a whole novel by simply reading a few tweets. 16. My most retweeted tweet was a profound quotation by Albert Camus rallying against nihilism. 17. That is a lie. It was a screen-grab of X-Factor boyband member Harry Styles looking like he had a massive erection. 18. My second most RT’d tweet was a scan of the undercarriage of a white cat with pink paws who had sat on a scanner machine. 19. I know people who monitor the success of every thought by its RT tally. I am not one of those people. 20. But if a tweet gets NO replies at all, it makes me edgy. 21. As I type this list I’ve got 54,851 followers. 22. As I type this list I’ve tweeted 27,325 times. 23. As I type this list I’m telling myself 90% of those 27,325 tweets were probably quick @replies to people and NOT actual posts in my timeline , because this makes it less of “a problem”. 24. I use Twitter clients and apps like TweetDeck or Echofon . I suspect they give me migraines but I just take codeine and carry on, for how can I monitor the universe in real time without multiple columns? 25. Twitter definitely made me more well known. I’m not sure if it made me more well liked. 26. I once said on an ITV2 show that X-Factor contestant Stacey Solomon was “not a terribly good singer” and had to leave Twitter for two weeks due to an angry twitchfork mob chasing me around cyberspace. 27. Grace Dent has been a “trending topic” on a few occasions. It’s not very nice really. It just opens you up to a global level of maniac. 28. Twitter led to me watching two weeks of all-night Olympic curling with @emmak67 and hundreds of other tweeters. I still do not understand curling. It looks like Olympic-grade housework. 29. I’ve spent New Year’s Eve on Twitter. It was better than going out. 30. Twitter led to me to keeping an emergency picture of a member of the rock band Kiss sneaking to a festival Portaloo just to cheer Twitter buddies up. 31. Twitter led to @gracedent being close personal chums with the pop star Will Young. 32. After several direct-message exchanges it turned out not to be Will Young, just a man pretending to be him while pulling furiously at his own penis. @gracedent was disappointed. 33. I often see that @gracedent has blocked someone “for absolutely no reason”. There has ALWAYS been a reason. 34. I sometimes block tweeters who demand I retweet them without even saying hello first. 35. I sometimes unfollow tweeters for RTing praise about themselves. 36. I still class it as RTing praise if they’ve cunningly added “THIS PERSON MUST BE MAD TO SAY THIS!!” on to the end of the tweet. 37. I once blocked @emmak67 during a row over politics to make a point that she was getting on my tits. Then, due to technical malfunction, I couldn’t unblock her for a week, which led to a month-long row. 38. I think the most boring tweets in the world are DJs’ “I’m at an airport” tweets. 39. Although any “I have jet lag. Boo-hoo, I’ll just order room service then” tweets are fractionally worse. 40. I would love to punch the person in the throat who thinks it’s a worthwhile task to set up a “sausage” bot . Or a “radiator” bot. 41. I love tweets featuring talking cats, snoring cats, cats jumping in boxes, cats jumping out of boxes etc. 42. I think there’s a strong pro-cat propaganda unit working on Twitter. 43. I think there’s either a worldwide dearth of clips of dogs being idiots, or the pro-dog lobby needs to up its Twitter game. 44. I suck at Twitter hashtags games. I tend to sit those games out. 45. I bloody love Twitter “pun” games. I’ll play them until the bitter end, when my puns need brackets to explain and no one replies. 46. I get arsey when non-Twitter people say Twitter is just people discussing their breakfasts. Only an idiot tweets their breakfast. 47. I do sometimes tweet about lunch. 48 . Twitter has made me seriously wonder if chronic pedantry is a social illness. People are crucified by their need to correct commas. 49. I think if you cancel an appointment with me due to being busy or ill you should have the common sense to stop fucking tweeting. 50. I believe 3,000 followers is the point at which lots of tweeters start behaving like utter maniacs. “3,000 follower syndrome” is a worrying medical condition. 51. The first sign of “3,000 follower syndrome” is apologising for not checking in on Twitter until later than usual, believing that Twitter must have felt so empty without you. 52. The second sign is placing tweets in your timeline answering the question you say “everyone” is asking you. If you check this person’s @ column it almost invariably turns out no one is speaking to them. 53. It gets even worse after that. 54. Twitter led to me chatting to Curt Smith from Tears for Fears . Me being the 11-year-old @gracedent who has Smash Hits on order from the newsagent and thinks this is very cool. 55. @simonjclebon once tweeted @gracedent but she was too shy to tweet back . @gracedent left him hanging. 56. I’ve left Twitter several times in a massive strop. 57. But I always, always come back. 58. I worry that I can never leave Twitter as normal life feels like wading through treacle. 59. I worry that I’m missing out if I don’t check Twitter. 60. I worry that Twitter has killed my ability to focus on one thought for more than 10 seconds. 61. I love it when other tweeters drastically announce they are leaving Twitter in a dramatic way. I call this “dumbass digital suicide”. 62. I make rude noises at my screen when tweeters @ me to say they’re unfollowing me. I’m not Moses, we weren’t going to the Promised Land. Follow whoever you want. 63. I unfollow my friends all the time. I think life’s too short to have someone pissing you off in your timeline. It’s like radio interference in your brain on a lovely day. 64. I’m freaked out by people who use “have you unfollowed me?” software to monitor who has digitally dumped them. Is there not enough pain in the world already? 65. I dread receiving the “very terrible oh-why-have-you-unfollowed-me boo-hoo email of doom”. 66. I think we focus too much on celebrities’ contribution to Twitter. Celebrities aren’t the tweeters providing interesting content. I discard them and their third-rate Twitter jibber-jabber all the time. 67. I unfollowed @piersmorgan for reading out his follower account figures all the time and begging for more like a telethon. 68. I unfollowed @Lord_Sugar for RTing questions asking where we could buy his book. 69. I unfollowed @ladygaga as she drones on all day about her “little monsters” like a saleswoman flogging U-bend germ-killer detergent. 70. I unfollowed @KimKardashian out of sheer pettiness because I like to believe I corner the market in “brunettes with big arses who contribute very little to the world of entertainment”. 71. I unfollowed @rustyrockets after his stag do ended up in Stringfellows. I was on a militant feminist tip that day, someone was going to get it. 72. I unfollowed @50cent because the poor man is almost entirely fixated on the daily happenings of his own penis. 73. I unfollowed @BarackObama because it turns out being Mr President is a whole lot of paperwork. Mate, there’s a reason I don’t tweet my VAT return. 74. I send 10 tweets a month to pop star Peter Andre giving him feedback about his career but he never replies. 75. I hate the terms “tweet-up” and “twunk” . 76. I love the term “twitchfork mob”. 77. When twitchfork mobs are circling some poor tweeter for crimes of thought I often add the rumour “I heard he bummed a puffin” simply to cheer myself up. 78. I love the term “twanking” (wanking while tweeting). 79. I get tweeted quite a lot of pictures of penises and offers of sex. “I fink we should make a play date 4 our GENITILZ!” one man wrote this very morning. 80. I get at least one unsolicited tweet a week from a stranger pointing out that in my current state of vast ugliness they’d never fuck me. 81. I think if one morning everyone’s direct-message box was suddenly, accidentally posted in the public timeline there would be rioting in international cities by lunch time. Most of this would be warring couples chucking bin-bags of clothes at each other. 82. I think most people don’t realise that posting a photo on DM means EVERYONE who looks at your photo account can still see it. It’s not private. I’ve seen two photos of my friends I wish I hadn’t. 83. One of them was in the bath. 84. The other one was indescribable but it scarred my retinas. 85. I’ve seen perfectly good marriages go down the pan because of Twitter. 86. I genuinely cringe at my friends publicly arse-kissing each other on Twitter. 87. I find the way some people blatantly social climb on Twitter vomit-making. 88. The phrase “let’s have a tweet-up” makes me nervous. I don’t think meeting people off Twitter is necessary to be friends with them. 89. I never like Twitter “tribute” sites where someone pretends to be someone else. I think they’re usually one joke stretched very, very thinly in search of a toilet book deal. 90. I know Twitter is the only place I can make jokes about my family, because, as of yet, they’re not on Twitter. Once they join, it’s all over. 91. I think the future of social networking lies in tackling the need for an individual to have “multiple personalities” living easily on one social networking platform. We are not one person all of the time, not even minute-to-minute. 92. I think there should be a meta-Twitter for gossiping about what we think other people are up to on Twitter. 93. At the moment I sometimes flip to Skype to chat face-to-face with friends about what we think the story is “behind the tweets”. It’s like Minority Report, but in pyjamas. 94. I get emails once a week from TV companies who say they want to “harness the power of Twitter but ON TELEVISION”. They then fart around with meeting for 10 weeks and realise it’s impossible. 95. This book is just a whole lot of my own personal thoughts, feelings and experiences of Twitter. I’m pretty certain you’ll disagree with most of it. 96. I chatted to scores of people about Twitter as I was writing the book. Absolutely nobody agreed with anyone else’s view on anything. 97. Everybody brought fresh angles and topics I’d never even thought of. I love this. Twitter is a totally different animal to everyone riding it. 98. I agreed to write How to Leave Twitter after a publishing meeting about a different book turned into an extended rant about RTs and Follow Fridays. 99. I showed some parts of the manuscript to good friends as I worked who went slightly ashen and said, “Grace, you’re going to break Twitter, you do know that, don’t you?” In a way, this is brilliant. Killing Twitter is my only real chance of leaving. 100. I’d have delivered How to Leave Twitter a lot earlier to the publishing house and avoided a lot of stress and shouting matches, but in all honesty, I was too busy dicking about on the internet. How to Leave Twitter by Grace Dent is available for £5 (RRP £7.99) with free p&p from the Guardian Bookshop . Call 0330 333 6846 or visit guardianbooks.co.uk . An ebook version is also available. Twitter Social networking Grace Dent guardian.co.uk

Posted by on July 8, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.