Chris Hansen’s blog

This article in Towleroad summarises the situation beautifully. Stephen Fry made a remark that was taken to denigrate women, but that he contended was a misquotation of a humourous aside. When a tweetstorm greeted him, he quits Twitter—a little short of a year after he first quit, in November 2009.

Now there is no one who admires Stephen Fry more than I do. An accomplished actor, humourist, technophile, author—so many superlatives and such a shedload of great work would normally ensure him a place in the untouchable pantheon that is online life these days. And yet, and yet…he is what I refer to as a serial quitter.

I’m sure you all know at least one serial quitter. They are people who get very enthusiastic about something—a group, an activity, a club, whatever. Then, after some slight (mostly imagined) to their person, or perhaps just something that they do not completely agree with, they quit the group, activity, club, whatever.

Oftentimes they rescind their resignation within hours or days of making it. Equally, often the group begs them to return, saying that, in effect, they didn’t mean it (pssst: they actually DID mean it…). Then the serial quitter unquits, until the next time.

I think that the serial quitter is looking for love and reinforcement from the groups they join and then quit. But that is not what Twitter is for. Twitter may serve as a vehicle for love for some celebrities: that’s why they flock there, get their accounts verified, and wait for the lurve to come flowing in. But, social networks are for communication between people. When you have nearly one million followers, communication is really only one way. The lurve comes flowing in, but nothing comes flowing back except Tweets (possibly written by the celebrity’s communications flack) not addressed to particular people but to the universe in general.

The Fryster’s main mistake was to actually read some of his timeline. His second mistake was to be indiscreet about, for example, movie sets he was working on. Leave the indiscretions to Wikileaks, Stephen. And, when you return (after all, you can’t really resign from Twitter, you can only take a hiatus) take it from me: send all the Tweets addressed to you or about you straight to DEV_NULL, and get a communications flack to vet everything you Tweet before it goes out into the Intarwebz. Oh, and don’t read reviews either. Just sit back and let the lurve wash over you.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 1st, 2010 at 07:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.