The twittering classes
I must come clean. When my tutor gave me the task of writing a feature on convergence culture/Web 2.0, I was not looking forward to it. Though I’ve long marvelled at the wonders of the Internet, it has not been for me the interactive side of things. All the blogging and twittering and Facebook poking. Some people just have too much time on their hands I thought. I wasn’t about to join the twittering classes. I had better things to do: books to read, things to learn, work to do...
I tried to get into the spirit of things though. I even signed up with YouTube to give myself a posting identity. Armed with the name of a John Coltrane track as my username, I carefully worded my first comments. There was a jazz track by Eddie Harris I liked and I posted a link to a hip-hop sample of it to spread the love. A couple of days later, I get a message in my hotmail inbox saying, and I quote, “F**k McMusic”.
Or McComments, McWriters. Just as I thought, this whole Web 2.0 thing was just the online version of reality TV. Our culture being dumbed down by giving idiots the means through which to advertise themselves. I resisted the temptation to respond in kind. But my brief foray into posting came to an angry end.
I also realised that far from being a digital native, I truly was a migrant from other times. A reluctant economic migrant at that. I want to write and just like my parents, who came to the UK over 30 years ago, I had to move to where the work was. Online.
So, here I was with a feature to write, struggling to get myself into it. Struggling to find something meaningful, something that made me see the good in all these new online voices.
Then I met Amanda. Or at least I felt I had.
Part 2: Amanda