I hated twitter for a long time before I realised I knew nothing about it. What a snob. I had pictured a whole lot of people chatting about nothing – but had no personal experience to back this up. So over December and January this year, I conducted a twitter experiment.
First I opened an account @cathoel and started saying things into the void. Like an ignorant guest at a dinner party who speaks without waiting to listen. I’ve since discovered a lot of people do this – broadcast rather than tune in. Me, me, me.
My first interest was as a poet and writer – could such short morsels be a form of discipline? I sent out a few instant poems, line by line. Eventually I noticed that other tweeting poets interlarded their own work with banners & brandishings. “Come see my blog! I got published in Magazine X! My poetry’s great!” So I set another little candle in the water, @cathoeljorss. Plain poetry, no chaser, no commentary, no celebrity.
As with facebook, it took me some time to work out what twitter could be for, in my world. Imagine television was invented right now. Wow! You might sit in front of it for a whole day. You might be going, Jeez, this is amazing, how incredible, it’s… kinda boring though. Much of twitter is like daytime television, only worse.
After a while – if you stuck with it – you might start to discover the streams of cooler water, the refreshing elements that interested you. Animation. Arthouse movies. Indigenous programming. What I did was found someone whose approach I liked and then mined their list of ‘follows’ to find more interesting people to ‘follow.’
I still can’t say ‘follow’ without inverted commas. It feels religious. I am not looking for a leader and I don’t want anyone to follow me. I think it’s retro. I think humanity and history are both at a stage where we need all hands on deck – everyone’s wisdom is essential, and the unheard voices are the ones we most need to hear. As the Transition Towns groundswell puts it, we need to start “harnessing the genius of the community.”
With this in mind I went back to twitter and opened a third account: @exmalcolmfraser. Malcolm Fraser is a former Prime Minister I admire because (in part because) at the Ideas Festival in Adelaide in 2003 he said, to a packed house, he felt more kinship with the Labor leaders of the day than with his own former Liberal colleagues. He said he wasn’t sure how much the Left in Australian politics had just shifted to the conservative Right – and how much his own maturity as a person was evolving so that he had become more and more compassionate and humane. I admire his humility and his kindness, expressed in action.
The tagline for @exmalcolmfraser is “an invitation to elders, mothers, statesmen, and all indigenous cultures to speak on public currents & events.” Which brings me to a difference I have noticed in the way I use twitter as opposed to the way it is most commonly used. I have little interest in promulgating Brand Me. I am a person, not a brand. I like my own work to be credited and read but I am more interested in society as a whole – @ustopia – and it seems to me by evolving several, more specialised little channels on twitter I can save people time so they get to subscribe to the one that interests them the most. I feel this new tool, still unwieldy in our hands, has a powerful potential for addressing one of the main issues that seems to me to be causing all this destruction and grief. Which is:
We’re not listening to each other! We’re not hearing one another. An Aboriginal man peacefully protesting is bundled into the paddywagon as though he were a danger to the state. Indigenous Brazilians are driven off their land. Older women are routinely invisible, all the knowledge, all the love, all the adventuring they have amassed just swept aside as of no value. Environmental crises: we have a lot of the technology we need. Innovators have invented cars which run on recycled cooking oil; fans that mimic nature’s own whirlpool shape and don’t waste energy in heat pollution. City councils have reduced property destruction by putting ‘victims’ (an elderly lady whose fence was defaced) in contact with ‘perpetrators’ (a young man with no strong female role models who is now required to do her gardening). It’s all about making the links.
I feel life is abundant and we have all the solutions we need. We just need to communicate. Including opening ourselves to the grief, anguish, wit and anger of our own hearts as well as the hearts of those around us. A patriarchal or matriarchal community survives on kingship – one central figure whose loss (hello, North Korea) causes everything else to dissolve into chaos. A sustainable community thrives on kinship – many weak links – like the internet. When the Egyptian government tried to shut down the web, there were plenty of individuals offering their own broadband accounts, opening phone lines etc to find ways round. This is subtle and powerful. It reminds me of language, perhaps the ultimate democracy outside of death itself.
Language is not built by any one person: it is a treasure trove collected by many hands. Anyone can invent a word – Shakespeare has, Margaret Thatcher has, I have. No one can dictate that their word shall remain in use, or mean what they declare it to mean. So on twitter I have also opened @dictionarme and @inventedword, the first: to invite new words invented by anyone, the second: to offer up words I have invented myself. I am interested to see how these new technologies will evolve. I suspect they will grow as a joint effort, with flashes of illumination cast by individuals. I suspect this is true of our world in general, if we are to survive.
The longing for a messiah is understandable, but dangerous I think. If there is a god, it is all of us together. Us is god. We add up. We are each necessary. We each contribute something unique. Individual responsibility – that is, individual freedom of action – is for me one of the most joyous lessons life teaches.
Perhaps this is a way forward for our giant interlocking crises as well. Energy: nuclear is an attempt at a silver bullet solution. It seems to me more likely we will work well with a patchwork, co-operative approach: stop wasting the 30% that burns off in heat and office buildings lit all night. Solar panel on every house. Wave power where there are powerful waves. Wind power where there is powerful wind. Similarly the water crisis: governments boast they are building “an $8bn desalination plant” to appease those who say, as though praying, “the Government’s gotta do something.” A gentler, more lasting and more effective solution again seems to lie in ‘a bit of each.’ Replace washers so your taps don’t drip. Move agriculture to areas where it is suited – no more growing rice in the desert. Industry to reduce waste. A water tank on every house. The wonderful thing about this approach is, it starts with me as well as you, we’re all in it together, and we can start now. Let’s.
