Being orijunal

This week, Kirsty Allsopp told her daughter to have children before her fertility drops off a cliff. This was bad because a) she’s taking no steps to have these dangerous cliffs fenced in b) her daughter doesn’t exist c) she didn’t really say that to her daughter, because her daughter doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, the Queen travelled to give a speech in a golden carriage. You don’t really get any multiple-choice for this “debate”: you just have to point out the irony of, like, she’s talking about austerity but like GOLDEN CARRIAGE, right? Right? But then Richard Dawkins said that Cinderella’s golden carriage wasn’t real, or something, and that was WRONG too because he’s a dick.

The great thing about Twitter is that it’s really easy to join in a conversation, and feel like you’re contributing, without any original thought at all. Wait, did I say “great”?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about networks, about how messages spread, about adding value to the conversations you participate in. I hope I don’t need to explain why copying and pasting other people’s tweets adds nothing. (In fact, it actually removes something from the conversation – correct attribution of the original comment.) Many people have heard me wailing that if you’ve got time to copy, you’ve surely got time to press the RT button instead.

But, leaving aside issues of attribution, how much value are you actually adding by re-sharing things? I used to assume that there was a tiny amount of value in being a small part of a network sharing useful information/valuable insights/cute cat pictures. Now I’m not so sure.

I think the 200+ people who shared a piece of tactical voting advice before the European elections thought they were doing something useful. It’s an excerpt from a longer blog post, but someone (presumably Jack Seale) screenshotted the bit about tactical voting and posted it to Twitter as an image, meaning that you could read it in seconds and share it seconds later. (Unless you're visually impaired and using a screen-reader, in which case: tough.) The solemn advice to vote Labour in south-west England because “the Greens don’t stand a chance” must have come as a surprise to Molly Scott Cato, newly elected Green MEP for, er, the south-west of England.

More recently, people have been sharing the blog post about how gender bias makes people take female hurricanes less seriously, which is bad because sexism is bad and also a hurricane could easily blow your fertility off a cliff. But then the study turned out to be rubbish, so we all had to share the other blog post about how it was rubbish.

In lighter news, we all laughed about the UKIP “common sense” bus driving into a railway station. Some of us posted a picture of it pointing out that it doesn’t exactly look like common sense! Others posted a picture saying that they clearly have no spatial sense! Others posted the picture and pointed out that this is hilarious! It’s hilarious because of the symbolism! Do you get it? UKIP are idiots! Guys, did you hear they totally crashed a bus?

In other words, dozens of people posted the same picture on Twitter, with eerily similar comments, and were rewarded for it with lots of RTs, because laughing at UKIP is how you signify belonging to a particular tribe. I have no idea who actually took the original picture, because they got no attribution from any of the people gleefully sharing their work. But hey, at least everybody on Twitter knows that the UKIP bus crashed.

Compare this with sharing news or information in real life. Think about the number of times that a piece of news fails to spread within a family, within a workplace, within a community. Think about how often you share a piece of news with one half of a couple, only to find that they haven’t breathed a word to their partner. I’m not talking about secrets; I’m talking about pieces of personal or community news that just don’t get passed on. Maybe a footpath floods, but nobody mentions it to their neighbours, so everybody finds out separately through trying to use it. The coffee machine at work breaks, and six colleagues separately work out from trial and error that it’s broken, then separately choose not to pass this information on.

Partly this is because, as a society, we look down on “gossip”. Yes, of course we still participate in and enjoy a good gossip. Many magazines owe their healthy circulations to our shared love of gossip. But it’s gendered as a “female” activity and it doesn’t have society’s approval as a worthwhile way of spending your time. (I won’t speculate on which way round the cause and effect is.)

But re-posting someone’s picture of a bus and saying “That’s not very sensible! LOL!” isn’t gossip. It’s participation in a public discussion. It’s political comment. That means it’s worthwhile. Meanwhile, picking up the phone to tell your great-aunt that your brother is getting married...that’s just gossip. It’s not worthwhile. Yes, you are making social contact with a lonely person, and sharing news she won’t get from any other source, and cementing ties within your family, but it just isn’t as useful as pressing the RT button to ensure that at least another 20 people see the picture of that UKIP bus because UKIP, right? LOL!

Can we challenge this? Can we get past the idea that you absolutely have to share what’s already being shared and get angry about what everybody else is getting angry about? I think what I’m trying to say is:

• where everybody is sharing, you can only add real value by saying something new
• where almost nobody is sharing, you can add value just by sharing something

I can propose a little fix for the first one. For a month, try only sharing things on Twitter that you discovered from sources other than Twitter. Janet McKnight suggested doing this for the month of June and J-P Stacey suggested calling it Orijunal. I’m going to give it a try, even though it's already the 5th of the month.

As for the second one? No little fixes. Because it’s the real world. You’re going to have to actually talk to people.