How To Leave Twitter is a hugely pointless book. But then, it's a book about a hugely pointless subject. Grace Dent makes you realise what an enormous waste of your life twitter really is (as if you didn't already know) but despite the title, she has no intention of actually leaving. She's a twitter addict. And like any addict, she's tried to quit, gone cold turkey, sometimes actually managed to walk away... but she always ends up falling off the wagon and going back to twitter's safe, comfortable, welcoming womb. Twitter is her castle and she is its queen. Why would she ever want to go back to being a lowly commoner?
My own relationship with twitter followed a similar trajectory to Dent's. Longterm readers of this blog will know that I, like most people, went from mocking anyone who ever tweeted to being sucked into its gaping, Sarlacc Pit maw. For a while there I was an addict too, though never quite to the level of Dent... because a) at the end of the day, I'm just an ordinary Joe, not a celebrity journalist whose followers number the tens of thousands; and b) I just don't have the time or energy to devote myself to it like some people do. Nor would I want to. That's not to mock anyone who does. Twitter's great for multi-taskers (if I tweeted while watching TV, I'd miss half the show) and those who thrive on a sense of community.
I found myself nodding in agreement at many of Dent's amusing and pithy insights into the society that spawned social networking...
It puzzles me how many people still believe 'friendship' or at least bonhomie conducted in cyberspace isn't a valid form of social contact, but, say, being thrown together at an NCT group, or in halls of residence, or because your desks at work face each other, is. Or that anodyne small talk with a neighbour is 'genuine social stimulation', whereas chatting with twitter with someone 6000 miles away who loves Top Gun and Jefferson Airplane as much as you do is just lonely, dysfunctional nerds clashing in cyberspace.
Given the nature of this blog, I could hardly argue with that... and I've been online long enough to recognise the horrible truth of this...
...arguing on the internet is like pulling a drunk's trousers back up for him in public.
In the end though, I wonder how long it'll be before the twitter bubble bursts and the site becomes as forgotten as myspace? Grace Dent is surfing the zeitgeist here, but will she too look back in five years time and wonder what all the fuss was about? And what will she - and the rest of us - be doing to waste our time on the internet then? The mind boggles...
