STEPHEN FRY

Hello there.

You have either asked me to retweet a post or to draw the attention of my followers to a particular site. It is quite probable that you want to alert as many people as possible to a worthy cause, an extraordinary person or perhaps a landmark day or event that should be celebrated and recognised by as many people as can be reached. It is just as probable that I heartily approve of your cause and its aims. And yet I am sending you here to this page on my website instead of complying with your simple and reasonable request. What on earth am I playing at? How can I be so uncharitable, so unfeeling? With a quarter of a million followers isn’t it my duty to use my captive twitter audience for good and noble ends?

Well yes. But try and understand how difficult it is to comply with your wishes for a number of reasons.

If I direct followers’ attention to one site on request, then don’t I have to for all?

Suppose I miss a particular request, suppose I just don’t see it stream past me?

Suppose one such ‘charity’ is revealed to be rather more self-interested and less charitable than I had supposed, not unlike certain appeals for sponsorship that have turned out to be little short of attempts to get money for a nice long holiday for some enterprising scamster? How can I have time to check out the dozens and dozens of sites a day? And yet, if I don’t, how can I be confident that I am not leading my followers astray and giving the oxygen of publicity to frauds?

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QQQ

Questions, questions, questions. I have sent you here because you have been asking questions. No sin in that. We grow wise by asking questions. The right questions.

Twitter is defined by the tweet, a word used to describe the up to 140 character postings of its users. Tweets answer the famous questions that Kipling maintained should be answered by any piece of journalism (and micro-blogging of the Twitter kind is no exception): who, why, how, what and where? Tweets tell us who the tweeter is, why they are tweeting, how they are tweeting, what they are tweeting about and where they are tweeting from.

Take the following tweet sent by @squalid_but_goodhearted_student which you spotted on the Public Timeline.

I feel so stupid. My cat got more questions right on Millionaire than I did. Always feel dumb the night before an exam. Help, I’m drowning. Sent five minutes ago via Tweetdeck

We know why that was sent – @squalid_but_goodhearted_student feels stupid and nervous and wants to share the fact in a silly, faintly amusing, studenty cri de coeur. We know who sent it – @s_but_gh_s. We know when – five minutes ago. We know how – via Tweetdeck. We know where (if we choose to check out @ s_but_gh_s’s user profile) Bottleby College, Sillyshire. And of course we know what the body of the tweet was and we can interpret it as a silly message sent by a drunkard, an act of showing off, a genuine message to friends, a piece of introspective meandering … the possibilities are many and various.

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You have asked me to follow you. I am touched and will do my best to do so when I get round to it. But the chances are I have missed your request. A request that is rendered no more attractive by capital letters, pretty-pleases or frantic begging. It will be easier for me to have a big follow session if you include #followmestephen in the text of your post. Then I can search easily and do a big follow session when my fingers and metacarpals are fit.

#followmestephen is an example of a hashtag. For more on these have a look here.

Thanks and see you out there in twitterland.

x
Stephen

© Stephen Fry 2009

Producer note: A number of you have made comments about being blocked and expressed some disappointment. Please be assured that it is due to a technical bug and not because @stephenfry has deliberately blocked you. I’ll contact each of you that have made a comment on here asking you to send me your Twitter user profile name so you can be unblocked. If you don’t hear from me, please email help@samfrylimited.com Best wishes, Andrew Sampson, stephenfry.com producer.