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.
Naturally Twitter has other applications: plenty of people use tweets to sell some ghastly life-coach ‘tool’, ‘technique’ or ‘philosophy’ (why do ninety percent of people use the word ‘philosophy’ when what they really mean is ‘self-delusion’, ‘con’ or ‘laughable piece of drivel that’s so self-evident it makes your nose bleed? Well that’s for another day). Good luck to them and those others who regard Twitter as a kind of sales opportunity. It’s not for me to tell anyone how Twitter should or should not be used. The founders of the service will tell you a tweet is there to answer the question “What are you doing?” – the other Kipling questions are incidentally answered by the technology and the ‘why’ will always be subject to interpretation.
For most of us Twitter is a fun (almost to the point of addiction) new, ever-changing wave that it is a bewildering and exhilarating pleasure to ride.
I am aware that I am something of a special case. Because of the number of followers I have and because I am someone who pops up on screen and in print there has been a tendency for a lot of new followers to arrive and start asking me questions. It’s fine to ask questions. But this is the digital age and Twitter is a digital instrument. Before you charge in and ask me what I’m doing, where I am, why my avatar is blacked out, when I’m coming back to Britain and a hundred other questions of that kind, stop, ponder, ask yourself one or two questions. Firstly whether I might have already answered your question in my timeline – that is the list of tweets I have already posted, found by accessing http://twitter.com/stephenfry. You can use the search facility at the bottom of the twitter webpage too. If you use a Twitter client for your mobile, smartphone or computer it too will have ways of allowing you to search. Or if I have in a post used a title, phrase, name, reference or word unfamiliar to you, can it not be looked it up using a search engine, online encyclopaedia or other resource? In other words: use your initiative: don’t ask me questions for the sake of it, or just as a way of getting a reply or direct message from me. If you are on the road with a mobile only and no access to the full range of internet search instruments then ask yourself this: is your question really so urgent that it can’t wait till the next time you’ve jacked into the matrix and can find out its answer yourself?
Why does any of this matter? Well, I’m happiest if my Twittering is reciprocal, as it should be. I tweet what I’m doing, thinking, feeling, wondering, hoping etc and you do the same. Twitter should make us equal. I know I lead what appears to be a blessed life of travel and excitement, and I’m happy to share my experiences, thoughts and adventures with you, but I’m also honestly and genuinely interested in you and who you are, how you’re thinking and what you have to say. I’m uncomfortable feeling as if all I’m supposed to do is sit in an audience chamber being endlessly petitioned and questioned while getting nothing back.
I know that asking me a question looks like the most obvious way of getting me to respond to you, but if that is the only reason you’re tweeting and the answer could easily be found out by other means, don’t you feel a bit silly asking it? A good question will delight me, but I think it’s only human to be frustrated by endless lazy ones. It’s not your fault. It’s scale. If I got only one question a day asking me why I was in Mexico, when I had already posted extensively the reason why, well fine. But fifty an hour all asking that question rather sours the whole experience…
I am not trying to humiliate you or make you feel guilty. You are probably new to Twitter and are still feeling your way forward. Every driver was a learner once. My first few tweets were three hundred characters long. I didn’t know how to follow people. I didn’t know how to send pictures or update my profile. We all learn and with such a rapidly growing service, we are all still learning all the time. I offer this blog to you to help you consider better and more enjoyable ways of using Twitter. Please don’t take offence or worry that I think less of you. I’m just trying to help us all. After all I could simply have ignored your tweet entirely.
So next time you want to post a question – stop, think: search the timeline or look it up.
Having said all that, don’t run away with the idea that I am insisting all Twitters ending with a question mark are invalid. There are plenty of questions that will amuse and stimulate me and all those following my timeline. A bit of thought is all….
Thanks for dropping by. See you 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.
I once had to baby sit a kid who asked me what I was doing every five seconds. Literally. We were about to have a bbq and conversation went something like this:
Kid: What are you doing?
Me: Chopping onions.
Kid: Why?
Me: ‘Cause people like onions on the barbie, you know?
Kid: Why are you wearing your sunglasses?
Me: ‘Cause the onions are making me cry
Kid: Why are they making you cry?
Me: I dunno, it’s just something that onions do, I’m not a scientist.
Kid: Why?
Me: Because I hate anything science related, prefer the unknown, and, besides, still find the fact that the human came up with stairs amazing.
Kid: Why?
Me: Because, you know, how did they do it, people? How did they figure out that stairs would get them from down here to up there?
Kid: What are you doing now?
Me: Washing the dishes
Kid: Why?
Me: Because they’re dirty
Kid: Why are they dirty?
Me: ‘Cause I’ve just used them to cut up the onions
Kid: Why are you cutting up onions?
Me: ‘Cause we’re having a barbie
Kid: Why are we having a barbie?
Me: Because we’re hungry
Kid: Why are we hungry?
Me: ‘Cause your body needs fuel in order to function and our fuel is food.
Kid: Why?
… I’m going to stop at this point. As you can imagine, after that annoying set of questions I ended up frying the kid on the bbq. And yeah, I’m writing this from gaol.
I, for one, live in hope that one day, you will digest one of my millions of updates and smile… or even laugh out loud. Or should I say LOL?
That would be the greatest Twitter achievement in my book.
I’m sure these people you refer to have already looked up the answer to the question, but they just want to interact with you in some way…
I wonder if your twitter experience is becoming tiresome since the Jonathan Ross interview… I started following you just a week or two before that interview, and you had 48000-something followers. That number doubled a few days after the interview and today is just over 250000. This seems to be a completely unmanageable amount of people, and you must have thousands of @ replies flying at you from all directions… It must be impossible to make any sense of it! I hope you’ll continue to share your interesting life on twitter, and I hope the mass of followers don’t get you down too much!
It’s pretty sad when Stephen Fry has to state the obvious to the Nettizens of the World Wide Web.
A noble effort at putting people on the right path.
Unfortunatly at the rate your twitterati is growing you are still going to be bombarded with @’s from the eagre and the unaware until they see this post. By that time a new wave of new followers will have joined the ranks. Still, its great how you assertively set the rules and still manage to come across smelling of roses!
I love you so much for this post.
Why don’t you tell people to read
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%40stephenfry
5 minutes after you sent a message? …taught me a lot about your side of twitter.
I wish to start by saying how much I enjoy reading @stephenfry’s tweets, they’re genuinely funny, witty and an all-too-good way to spend an hour of my day, sifting through his messages to twitter-land, but I find myself getting more and more frustrated with a few things.
I do appreciate that Stephen has a quarter of a million followers; that’s even long to write out in words, but the last 5 links that he has tweeted have linked to various advice about how/what to twitter @stephenfry. This isn’t what particularly got to me, but what did was the fact that on a couple of occasions these were written in direct reply to another tweet. Now I don’t know about you, but imagine this:
You’re in a room with 250,000 people and something that you have said has been heard by Stephen Fry, but the thing is, he’s replied saying “You qualify for both. READ THEM!! Doh!!!”. I for one would be MORTIFIED for 250,000 people to witness me receiving Stephen’s frustration. With so many followers, it really is essential to try to keep unnecessary tweets to @stephenfry to a minimum, but is it really necessary to have directed these pages to specific people? Why not simply occasionally remind tweeters of your recommendations/guidelines.
I’m not meaning this as an angry rant, I can sense the frustration in Stephen’s recent tweets and that’s not ideal. I want @stephenfry to enjoy tweeting, for it not to be a laborious chore, but I felt that I should say my piece.
Flames/comments etc. then I’m @petemwah for angry/agreeable replies…
Hey there,BigStuart! read your little commment on the effects of the Jonathan Ross interview, emmm, interesting! just to let you know that it reminded me of the spotty little creeps that sucked up to the teacher at my old school. Poor, poor Mr Fry, unindated with all those nasty little twitters, now you will have to share him with the rest of us sad gits who canot or will not leave the house. Have to go the soups arrived and the bastards have given me another one of those bendy straws again. I CAN ONLY HOPE THIS DOES NOT GET YOU DOWN TO MUCH!
Hmmmm…Just wondering if Mr. Fry has bothered to read this himself? As his last post was a question he could have just as easily googled.
Well I haven’t got a question…..but I do have an answer! (Question is an interesting word = “Quest~I~On”
I watched the Shrink Rap with Pamela and youself and thought..”This guy just HAS to be a Virgo”…so I oogle-googled you and voila! Yes..you are.
Out. out damn wot!! to those Quests~You~on for diagnosis, an explanation, a self acceptance and blah-wah-ha…Virgos are born immersed in the predisposition to self criticism, worry and angst and the answer lays not in therapy…but in going in to rescue the Magical Child!!
You can read about the Magical Child in Exile here:
http://carolom.wordpress.com/2007/01/02/the-magical-child-in-exile/
I was once reminded “You are perfectly acceptable exactly as you are and you don’t need ‘fixing’…you just need….Loooove.
Begin Within!! Check out Billys interview with Pamela and find out where that sweat lodge was.- the one thathas transformed him to a deper sense of Peace…..I reckon it might be just the thing to melt your Virgoooey iceolation Stephen!
Bless you and thankyou for your heart felt candour and stories…I hope you might find something of interest in my Answer-not-a-Question.
Carol Omer
Here’s a website that’s useful in this sort of situation:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com
For example, with a google search for “Stephen Fry”:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=stephen+fry
Or perhaps “Power monkey”, to use an example from a few weeks ago:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=power+monkey
The interwebs are full of such clever people
I’m wondering how often people ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” That and, “If you could go back in time and keep Hugh Laurie from being born, would you?”
Well done, for being so sincere, educational and nice.
A fantastic way to deal with what must be quit tiresome
I for one have learned a lot as a new user of twitter.
Thankyou
Dear Stephen, could I be so bold as to also suggest to your readers http://www.frygle.com which I designed to both search your timeline, your website and then the rest of the web, all in one go. Thus allowing a quick search with a bias for the things you have said yourself… cheers, nik
ps. apologies for using “both” to described three things – I appear to be wrecking the language
I hope you are not falling out of love with twitter Mr Fry?
I’ve enjoyed reading (through monstrous green eyes) about your whale of a time in Mexico. I hope you enjoy Indonesia. I was there last year (in Sumatra) drawing orangutans and it really was something I will never forget.
Fondest,
Martin
Hello,
I wondered if you would be kind enough to put me in touch with someone who could give me advice on writing my autobiography or turn my story into a film. It probably will make a good channel 5 feelgood inspirational film and nothing more maybe but at least my story will be told and my little lad will have some financial security. I had written two chapters of my book before I became ill and too tired to continue or even be bothered, then my laptop was stolen and I now have to start again but I need motivation and advice.
Thanks for reading
Jo
Hi
I am awfully sorry to bother you, but being new to twitter a few months ago after my niece telling me how often you tweet I began following you. I so enjoyed reading your updates but I was so dissapointed to find a few days later you had blocked me. I am quite sure I haven’t tweeted anything which may upset you and doubly sure we have never met. I am curious to know why?
Thank you
Kate
I had lots of questions for you, but now I realise that most of them can be translated into the phrase; “I love you Stephen.”
sigh,
This is awesome! Very well put, I must say. I have very much enjoyed following you, and now I have a question for you, Stephen; would you care to follow me on Twitter? I’m mostly shy and uninteresting, but I do tweet when it’s worth tweeting about. You can find me @bburg_taylors. Hope to see you there!
Heather
LOL
This post is like being told off with a continuous hug
x
Hmm; as a neonatal twitter-er how can I ask a question so profoundly challenging and unique that a personal reply – other than ‘piss off’, ideally – is irresistible?
Remarkable trouser collection, too.
‘Ted’
There was a young fellow called Fry
Whose IQ was incredibly high
As his knowledge expanded
He found himself landed
Behind a very large desk at QI!
Love from Rusty Gladdish AKA Desirel @Twitter and a fellow Rooster!
oh i know how you feel Mr Fry (oo look at me being all formal)
There was a girl in my school who used to ask me question after question after question
“So why does this atom do this?” when the teacher was staring her in the face and then when i plucked up the courage to tell her to stop asking me questions and ask the man whos paid to do it she told me i was being racist!!
So can i ask a question about…. sorry im not cruel honest…
as per the note at the bottom of this post i have also found myself blocked
started following several weeks ago and found that the tweets has stopped and did not think much of it until i looked into it further and found I was blocked
glad to hear it was not something i had done because I do not recall tweeting to mr fry at all
thanks for the help in advance
Here is my question (and I have been searching all over for a simple way to email it to you, but this is all I can find):
I am a short cab ride away from you in Bali and would LOVE to just shake your hand and give you a big, big smile. Any chance at all of that? Name the time and place and I’ll be there!
If not, I understand. Hope you enjoy Bali. I’ll just recommend the finest cafe/restaurant I know: Cafe Bali on Jl. Oberoi (aka Jl. Laksmana), Seminyak. The food is excellent and the decor is a blissful french classic style. Missed it when I was away. OH and La Luciola is superb food too. A tad more pricey but worth it.
As you say in this post you are interested in who we are, I’ll try to knock up a quick bio here:
I’m 35 and Norwegian/English living in Australia. (Looking into moving to Bali though!) Have travelled a lot. Struggling to agree to have babies with my boyf. Spent 2 weeks as a naughty cadet in the Norwegian air force. Danced a traditional Tibetan dance solo for the Dalai Lama and 10,000 other Tibetans. Was on one of the first reality tv shows in Norway back in ‘94, paid to travel around Europe for 3 months. That was marvellous. Spent the last 5 years working at a charity promoting optimal mental health in Australia in various fun and sometimes innovative ways – best job of my life. Studied psychology at Oxford but never really found myself as bright as that should suggest, unfortunately.
Anyway, I’m sure I couldn’t come up with anything particularly useful to say on meeting you so I’d just like to shake your hand and give you a big smile! If I could.
Not sure if you can reply direct to my email or not. If not, you could email me at quickanon@gmail.com (couldn’t put my normal personal email up here).
Marietta
Oh Dear,
This is most upsetting.
All this time I was hoping ‘Twittering’ had something, anything to do with being “Twitterpated”.
*sigh*
i’m new to twitter (same user name) and just started to follow you but was then blocked ): still i know understand not to ask you useless stuff e.g “what’s for tea” or “what’s your favourite type of chocolate”
Dear Mr Fry
Sorry to send you another comment but I omitted to put in the necessary #fryretweet you requested on your twitter – very remiss of me as this was the very reason I was commenting in the first place! If you cannot connect this to my earlier comment, I’ll reiterate – I recently sent you a letter c/o Thames Talkback and wonder if you have received it and the enclosure? My anxiety and depression are gradually worsening again and it would be most uplifting if I thought that I may receive a reply to my letter in the near future.
Regards
Maxine Willden
Given that there are about a million, ok half a hundred, and now one more reply to Stephen’s “Questions, etc.” blog must I indulge my own little rant…here it is in question form and plain english…If the “micro blog” application (for lack of a better word and even less interest in finding a better one) if the app is called “twitter” then why oh why do people insist on describe their actions on TWITTER as TWEETING…!!!!!! I propose it has something to do with the word “twit” in reference to themeselves….
In any case, happy TWITTERING or TWITTING ….I like that, twitting….goes well with “wuh wuh wuh://stephenfry.com”
Dear FruHonningbie,
I myself am a “TWIT” and find the above post a little offensive.Considering the Phenomenal amount of people that use Twitter ,and so many of them being actually very intelligent,maybe you could take on board its just a little “Pet” name and has no bearing on the people that use it what so ever.Still you are entitled to your opinion,however it does seem aimed at one particular person,who definitely does not deserve it .
Yours
FryQI
I don’t twitter and I don’t want to learn because I spend too much time online as it. I found this site because I was googling around looking to see if you had done any writing on bipolar disorder. I loved your documentary because I have it too and so much of it made me laugh. I’d never push the button either : )
I’m not joining twitter to find out if it’s in your logs though. It’s a manic thing – I might never resurface if they’re funny.
Hi Stephen,
Very interesting reading this blog makes and thank you for posting. I have to admit I totally agree with you on most of this, yes why do people ask such silly questions when indeed they can simply check out your timeline or go and bother google.
I have been following you for some time now on twitter and I so much enjoy reading your updates, what you are doing, where you are travelling to, reading about your theatre & film recommendations and so on. It is fantastic for you to share and I (we) am grateful to receive.
I do however have a little chip on my shoulder, and please take this as positive criticism and I do not intend to be negative or upset you in anyway.
When I first started following you I posed the question “Follow me please #followmestephen†and to date nothing. Since then I have not posed another question simply as I don’t feel you will have the time to respond. However, I have commented on many occasion on some of your updates, the most recent ones must have been when you posted the fact that it was Big Bens 150th anniversary, in return I tried to be a witty (and I am sure I failed miserably) by posting something about the clock tower being 150 and not Big Ben as Big Ben is only the bell inside the clock tower. Today you mentioned World Oceans Day, and again I responded by showing my support in World Oceans Day. In the past I posted to you a simple message to say “Thank you for everythingâ€. Now yes I agree you are busy and as you mentioned in your blog above you tend not to answer silly questions, but what about us Twittereenos who engage into updates with you? Do we not qualify for the odd response or acknowledgement from time to time? You state it is not just a take situation and we should give as well, and I do.
Anyway…. My apologies for the moan, just felt it was needed.
Love you lots
Jason (@jasonkoen on twitter)
THANK YOU for saying that people should take the effort to go and look up a word if they are unfamiliar with it and cannot dissertain contextual clues. THANK YOU.
I read this article every now and again just to feel better about being frustrated with being admonished for using a vocabulary word – which inspires the response of “BIG WORD” from the other would be participant in an online conversation.
I polish your buttons Mister Fry, just for the sake of being able to touch the shine.
LadyGirlPerson <– Twitter Name.
A person that inspires me is you. I have been inspired by many people; my subconscious always gets the better of me and shows you Mr Fry.
Kind Regards Amanda http://lamiafemina.deviantart.com/