Author Archives: Stephen Tall

There’s an irony in me writing this post. It’s about a fortnight now since I sat down and forced myself to work out how Twitter works, and what it was good for. I’d set up an account in 2007 (my first and last update recorded that I was “working frantically”; for whose benefit I uttered such an aphorism I now forget), but that’s as far as it went. I’m now gradually becoming a convert to the cause, in spite of rather than because of the Twitter-phile joy in which my LDV colleagues regularly indulge on this site – of which there are two exempla already this week, here and here.

The Times’s Rachel Sylvester has today published a widely panned article deriding the Twitter phenomenon, spuriously implying an inverse relationship between the growth in politicians who Twitter and a “wider loss of confidence by the political class”. Quite what her logic is escapes me – it appears to be a recycled hack-job of just the kind of nonsense which was being scribbled by journalists about blogging not so long ago. Before they themselves started blogging, that is. Or about texting before everyone realised how handy it is. Or about television/radio/telephone before that. Mostly, the article reads like the special pleading of someone so insecure about her own inability to comprehend something new that she would prefer to stick to simple knocking-copy instead.

Twitter is, let’s remember, simply a tool which allow its users to communicate and interact with each other in a way which suits them. It may not suit Rachel, it may not even suit Guido – but there are thousands of others it does suit. And many of them are constituents with just as much right to communicate with their MP as a Times journo.

But don’t take my word for it – a few other Lib Dem bloggers have today been extolling the virtues of Twitter, especially following its widespread deployment during the party’s spring conference this past weekend.