Twitter – Washing your cyber laundry in public

Like a kind of chatty fungus, twitter’s totally grown on me. I love it. It satisfies those less than lovely character traits in me – my incessant need to know stuff first, my slight nosiness (which my husband will testify to having witnessed me peeking round the blinds in our flat in Stoke Newington when we lived in London at 4am on a Saturday morning looking at the gang fight happening right below our window – “will you come away from the window you crazy staring lady you’re going to get us killed”).

Twitter’s a strange bird. It’s allowed us to get close to the innermost feelings and opinions of people whose comment and copy are otherwise generally edited and misquoted, retouched and twisted. It manages to be crazily intimate (Holly Willoughby’s contraction-by-contraction birth report from her mate Fern - eugh enough already) and massively broadcast at the same time. The difference and distance between being a celebrity and an unknown was already becoming blurred and shortened with the explosion of reality shows, celeb magazines and the Internet. Twitter has made the distance seem minute. Stalkers must be having a field day.

What I think I love best though is how it puts us all on a level playing field,– i.e. those on t’telly and those not. Demystifying them once and for all, proving that really they are just like us, just a bit more famous. My favourite recent example of this was a theatre writer taking umbrage at having been, in his opinion, unfairly interviewed by one of Radio 4’s presenters. The theatre writer tweets his annoyance and the presenter then fired back his response and voila – supposedly reserved and professional blokes on the radio having a row in our full glare. Oh the joy – and so much safer than watching rival Stoke Newington gang fight each other!

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