Of Tweeting Importance

Twitter seems to be becoming a place where people get more and more angry, for less and less time. It seems like there's blizzards of stuff sweeping the place, then it all calms down and everybody has a cup of tea before getting angry about something else.

The Synod Women Bishops vote hurt and anguish lasted - in the Twittersphere -  about 2 days before everybody got back to normal. Many people, of course, are still hurt/angry/determined, but others - the ones who are maybe less genuinely interested and therefore probably more short-term angry - saw a picture of a kitten or something and it all get better. Sure, people are always angry about things the Government does, but if they're angry with something in the morning they're normally angry about something totally different in the afternoon, and by tea time the afternoon anger has been totally dissipated by whatever is causing the evening anger.

I guess it all comes down to people getting used to the new technology. When you had to copy communications out by hand, England got really angry over something France did - thought they'd have their own, non-English king, or something - and it took 100 years for the war to be over. In 1914, they'd invented the telephone and it was 4 years before the Armistice was signed. In the 1960s they had television, and they got a war down to 6 days. Today you can get a tweet round the world at the speed of light, and it's all calmed down within an hour and a half of everybody jumping up and down.

Or it's down to our shortening attention spans. We are so bombarded with information now, that there genuinely is something shocking to consider coming along every half-hour. In the past we'd only get as much fury as you could see in one news programme - but now there's a billion people, pumping shock and outrage towards us on a constantly open waveband. There really are a million things to get upset about - there probably always were - but we used to have the trouble throttled back by the limitations of our technology. Now we have to time-slice the uproar to fit it all in.

The rate things are going, within a few months we'll have people on Twitter incandescent with rage - for ten minutes. And then one day something so shocking will happen that we'll all manage just one tweet each, and then we'll all explode. It'll probably be a council charging 40p for a replacement bus-pass, or a church where a neighbour has complained about the clock chiming. But we'll all be livid. Briefly.