Characters find home on Twitter
Doucet admitted that, while under pressure from her superiors, she’d been something of a reluctant convert, the turning point coming a couple of years ago when anti-government protests in Iran were brutally suppressed. She was in the Beeb’s Tehran bureau when rumours began to circulate of large crowds gathering in the streets, and she recalled how a generational divide immediately manifested itself in the office as she and older colleagues went to their laptops to see what was moving on the wires while younger, mainly local, members of staff gathered on the sofas to commune with their smartphones. Almost immediately, the sofa group were shouting out instant eyewitness updates of what was happening at locations all around the city, while the older hands stared helplessly at their slow-moving computer screens.
Doucet is now an avid tweeter herself, noting that Twitter and Facebook really came into their own as news-disseminating tools during the Arab Spring. Given the powerful propaganda possibilities and amateur origins of so much of the content, she acknowledged there can still be major problems about accountability and accuracy but, overall, she left her listeners in no doubt that the social media revolution should be regarded as a boost rather than a threat to broadcast journalism in its pursuit of truth.
Which is fine, except that Lyse Doucet doesn’t have to cover something as important as football. She is only a war correspondent after all.
As a Twitter illiterate — a Twilliterate? — myself, I still need to be convinced that, in terms of sport, the medium is as vital as its most avid devotees insist. Good for a newsy heads-up or the odd quotable quote, for sure, but ultimately with a bang for your buck return that seems preposterously small considering the deluge of dross that has to be sifted through in order to uncover a nugget. And, as for officialdom getting in on the act, well, they’re hardly going to tweet something they don’t really, really, really want you to know, are they?
A lot of footballers seem to love it though, and it’s when they shoot their mouths off that the medium comes into its own as a boon for the back and even the front pages. In recent years, football clubs and players have become increasingly skilled in media management.
What I find fascinating about Twitter is the apparently compulsive aspect of tapping a few letters into a phone which causes someone to proclaim something to thousands of people which they’d be reluctant to say to a lone hack. And, even more astonishingly, which they then appear to almost instantly regret having said (as opposed, presumably, to having thought).
James McClean might have been deeply frustrated and angry in Kazakhstan but, grim as that Irish performance was, he was hardly in a situation analogous to someone in a war zone taking advantage of one last desperate chance to get the word out to the wider world. Yet, rant he did, from the comfort of the team bus apparently — only to then instantly fold like a cheap deckchair after being made aware of his error.
Ditto Ashley Cole, his tweet describing the FA as “a bunch of twats” followed before the day was even out by an apology to the association and then, a couple of days later, by a personal apology to chairman David Bernstein. “He came to see me last night and apologised to me personally,” said Bernstein in tones of deep gravitas. “He showed real contrition. It was a serious apology. He expressed a degree of remorse for what he had done, wished it hadn’t happened. I looked him in the eye and really felt that he meant it.”
Touching, but one wonders what Bernstein had thought when he looked him in his tweet, as it were.
It’s quite bizarre. Either some footballers now think they can have their cake and eat it — and they’re certainly wealthy enough to pull off that trick — or there is a compulsive aspect to the relationship with Twitter which is of such an addictive intensity that, before long, there will be gatherings of Twitters Anonymous groups battling to stay away from keying in that first letter.
Not that the old ways are necessarily any less fraught, I suppose. Consider Roy Hodgson, man of the people, and his friendly chat with some passengers on the Tube in London. Next thing he knows, he’s sitting in front of the media having to apologise to Rio Ferdinand.
At least we know that wouldn’t happen to Giovanni Trapattoni. Because if he hopped on to a DART carriage with 20 people on board you can rest assured there’d be 20 utterly conflicting versions of the ensuing conversation doing the rounds before he even had a chance to hop off again.
As for Twitter, at least us greybeards can’t keep saying there are no characters in football anymore.
