Once again, we present a bespoke selection of newsy fripperies which you may have missed on account of that other stuff you were doing.
On Wednesday, Twitter media wonk Robin Sloan told a TV industry conference that the site is shaping the way that we view TV. He described Watching With Twitter as a kind of ‘3-D TV’ – and if you’ve ever spent a happy hour glued to the Apprentice while your laptop fries your tackle, you’ll know exactly what he means.
If you are one who enjoys the occasional dip into mainstream TV, but cannot bear to watch without bellowing a constant stream of snide asides, heavy irony and general smartarsery, then Twitter is certainly your friend.
There is no pleasure so gorgeous as a guilty one, and there is no guilty pleasure which is not enhanced by the doing of it in the company of likeminded souls. In this sense, Twitter is nothing less than a gigantic Mexican stand-off of shared guilt. We’re all in it together.
Granted, viewing TV through the medium of Twitter does little to cement real life domestic bonds. My beloved sits on the chilly end of the sofa, arms crossed - you know the posture, and what it signifies. My children’s background plaints for food or interaction are muffled by the insistent, pulsing beat of the hivemind.
But gawd, it’s fantastic. You can be with other people, communicating comfortably and casually, like a giant Royle Family – yet individually, physically, they are miraculously absent.
Twitter will not drop crumbs or chatter on through crucial bits of dialogue. With Twitter, you have agency. You can quickly scan your stream for those tweets which enhance your viewing pleasure – but can silence them instantly if something kicks off on-screen, by the simple trick of Looking Up. Your epigrams on the advisability of interrupting Alan ‘Lord’ Sugar occasionally elicit a satisfying "LOL :-)" – and if they more often elicit a series of dismissive grunts, no matter! You can’t hear them, or see them, because they haven’t invented a grunt emoticon yet!
In The Future, I will watch television inside a soundproof box, big enough to contain me, my reclining Parker-Knoll, and Twitter. During the summer months, I will switch to one of these lovely things, enlarged and customized to contain both my head and the tv, and to filter out the frequencies at which real-life children whine, and adults breathe noisily.
If you don’t follow the admirable David McCandless, the brainiac digital aesthete behind the Information is Beautiful book and site, then please consider doing so immediately.
McCandless’s elegant visualisations of the reams of data which fall out of social media’s back end offer a flash of insight into the intricacies of modern life. This week, for example, his analysis of Facebook updates revealed the points in the year when your relationship is most likely to crumble to dust.
According to McCandless’ research, springtime is a flashpoint for dumpery –out with the old, in with the new and all that – as is the summer holiday season, which can clearly offer too much of a good thing.
But wait! There is a further spike two weeks before Christmas - after which point, presumably, the benefits of being free (free!) are outweighed by the social opprobrium likely to be heaped upon the kind of person who cuts their mate loose at Christmas, forchrissakes.
People, we are now mid-November. That spike is getting closer. Keep your wits about you - and for goodness’ sake smile, and pucker up.
You’ve got to hand it to Google, they are masters of that iron fist/velvet glove thing.
The company is famously generous towards its employees – indeed, it’s common knowledge that their HQ is basically a scaled-up version of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, the centrepiece of which is an enormous river of melted Hershey bars upon whose creamy tide float nap-time pods made of giant Kinder Egg containers, stuffed with super-sized marshmallows.
On the far shore, little orange folks gather, ready to pick up your dry-cleaning (as you can imagine, there are frequent sticky mishaps), or to fetch you a wheatgrass shake drawn from the Fountain of Eternal Youth, if you’re feeling liverish.
But, as with Wonka, so with Google: things can turn pretty ugly if you insist on taking the mick.
This year – despite mucho belt-tightening across other companies and industries – Google has promised its employees a tidy 10% rise on top of their already munificent salary-and-stock packages. That’s before merit increases, and also before a holiday bonus of one thousand of their US dollars, tax-paid.
"We want to make sure that you feel rewarded for your hard work, and we want to continue to attract the best people”, the company purred in an internal memo.
Now, there’s nothing more irresistible to those of us whose life-cushions aren’t quite so well-plumped than the sweet self-loathing generated by the good fortune of others. So of course BusinessInsider.com leapt at the chance to publish the memo - marked confidential in CAPS and offered them by a Google employee – which announced the company’s largesse.
What motivated the insider to leak the memo is less clear - as is the means by which Google’s enforcers identified the mole.
But ferret him out they did, and yesterday the company announced to its staff that the employee in question had been terminated. This isn’t quite as extreme an overreaction as first it sounds to British ears, but still – a swift and brutal excision, and one which will have left those remaining with a sharper sense of their own dispensability than previously.
Still, they have their 10%. Alas, the unhappy blabbermouth lost all. It is small consolation, I imagine, that he or she was not sucked into a small pipe like the corpulent Augustus Gloop. Or juiced, like poor Violet Beauregarde, the blueberry girl.
I have been contemplating Stephen Fry’s uncharacteristically clumsy media presence, and pondering the difficulties of being upset on Twitter.
In case you weren't concentrating, the usually sure-footed Fry caused a bit of a hoo-hah by making certain assertions about why we ladies do the, um, do. Claims which, for reasons too numerous to mention, he wasn’t able to substantiate.
He got a bit of stick, both in the press and on Twitter, and threatened, not for the first time, to leave the social network.
Now, regardless of how you stand on the original issue - and as you can imagine
I stand with my arms firmly crossed, an expression of sour distaste playing about my lips – it is interesting to note that the Twittersphere did not respond well to the threat of being flounced upon. And truthfully, it was a rather odd thing to threaten, given that the original kerfuffle was generated in the mainstream media and didn’t have much to do with Twitter at all.
But it raises the question – what to do when social media all becomes too much?
Though it differs markedly from it in many respects, in this Twitter matches real life: in the event of a bit of upset, it is almost always wiser to slip quietly away, dignity intact, than to flounce out, slamming the door behind you. Your scarf or tie is certain to get caught in the jamb, causing a comical whiplash effect which will undermine the power of your argument. Or, as you pointedly turn your back, you will reveal the crumpled tail of loo-paper which you have humiliatingly tucked into your kecks.
Then, when you realise you have left your keys and your coat back at the party, you will be forced to slink back in with your loo-paper tail between your legs (yes; I have lost control of this metaphor) and sit down quietly in the corner, while everyone politely ignores your hiccup-y sobs.
Far better to slip away, quietly shutting the door behind you. Then, by the time people are beginning to wonder where you are, you will have realised that it’s not the end of the world, reapplied your lippy, practiced your happy face and will be ready to face the music once more. No-one need be any the wiser.
Finally, it is Friday. Kick back, relax, and savour the moment with a delicious cocktail of possibly-NSFW autocorrect fails. And what better way to begin than in the company of Anthony from Wendy’s.
A bientôt, mes amis!
For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for more general twittery, @KateVWilliams.
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