Trudy uses Twitter for two things and two things only. The first is to find work. It was her brother who set up her account. He has a sign- fitting business and he uses Twitter as part of his work. He knew Trudy is always short of money and struggling to make ends meet, what with looking after the two kids, so he explained that Twitter could help her get cleaning and other odd jobs. She could give herself a name, includ-ing for instance the term ‘girlfriday’ – effectively someone flexible who will do pretty much anything to help out. Then she could tweet that she was in a particular area if anyone had any cleaning they needed doing, or she could try #gardening or #ironing or pretty much #anythingfor-whichyouwillpayme£8anhour and hope people would find her through the hashtags. The result:
So yeah, not bad really. Building up the hours. That’s it really. That’s how I use Twitter. My mobile number is on there. They text me. It can be a bit daunting ’cos I got a text message from a lady, and she just said Hi would you come to Treedon to clean. As a woman you have to be careful that it’s not a man contacting you. And you go to his house and then you’re vulnerable aren’t you? So I just replied Yes I would. I’m thinking is this a man, straight away. Just suspi-cious. On Twitter my name isn’t on there (actually it is, but, she just doesn’t realise this). So after a while they said their name was
‘Naz’ by the way. I still didn’t know if it was a man or a woman.
I was thinking. It could also be a sort of Arabic male name. After a while she said, ‘my husband and I’. So that was really reassuring.
And I went there, lovely couple, young professional, safe. This Naz, she’s got two ladies on her road, friends, who want a cleaner, so this is word of mouth, more word of mouth.
Trudy’s second usage is even more idiosyncratic. Apart from finding some way to earn money Trudy’s real problem is her offensive and abusive ex- husband. They have not spoken for a year since he verbally abused her over the loudspeaker at school in front of their children, but she cannot get a legal constraining order on him since he has not actu-ally been physicactu-ally violent. She has at least prevented him from taking the children back to where he lives, a place he shares with other men she is very dubious about. The point is that her ex- husband started following her on Twitter, which meant that with her brother’s help she could work out who he was on Twitter. As a result they could discover yet another side to him – not just that he could stalk and abuse on Twitter, but that he was basically also a Twitter idiot. He clearly did not get that it might not be wise to wind up Manchester City football fans to the degree that they were threatening to find out where he lived and beat him up. That if you did want to use prostitutes it might not be entirely sensible to follow them through Twitter, post their pictures and make pretty clear what was going on between you and them. Trudy’s brother finds it hilarious, spying on her ex- husband and seeing all the mayhem he seems to enjoy causing and then watching how it all backfires on him: ‘Oh another thing. Everyone takes the piss out of my ex. It’s his spelling. His spelling is atrocious. He will insult someone online and they’ll come back and say you can’t even spell you idiot. No the funniest was, when he said to someone, “Oh you idiot you can’t even spell” and in that very sentence he had about three spelling mistakes.’
Most accounts of Twitter, not surprisingly, do not really seem to have people such as Trudy in mind or either of the two ways in which she uses Twitter. However, the next three cases are further examples of peo-ple who use Twitter for one thing only. Keane uses Twitter for the sole purpose of following comedians, including Russell Kane, Chris Moyles and Alan Carr. Shannon follows Twitter mainly for keeping up to date on various feminist organisations, and likes the way she can click through to find out more about what is going on. Geraldine also has one primary use for Twitter, which is to make complaints about companies. She found that writing letters tended to be ignored, and making phone calls also got her nowhere because these are both private. Making a complaint on
Twitter, however, is in the public arena and directly affects the compa-ny’s reputation. As a result Geraldine now feels that the place to make a fuss over any issue she might have with any company is Twitter. It seems the only effective way to get a response.
Denise by contrast has two distinct uses, and at 17 a sophisticated policy of discrimination. She has an ordinary profile, which is where she behaves as a regular 17- year- old schoolgirl, but she also has another account that she keeps under careful lockdown because this is where she is trying to develop her musical career and where she wants people to take her seriously. So it is very important that this second account is not polluted by the first.
Lara is a journalist. We tend to think of Twitter as a key source of our news, but it has become just as important to those who publish news. For her the Twitter hashtag is a key means to find out what is hap-pening locally. That month her ‘scoop’ had been a news item about an escaped peacock. She was able to track the story and the photographs people were putting up, and thereby the peacock itself. Through Twitter she also found the farm from which the peacock had escaped, and even the peacock’s name.
Tobias is an example of a Twitter addict: ‘Last thing I do before I go to bed is Twitter. First thing I do when I get up is look at Twitter.’ He wants to go to bed, he waits and waits until it is late and for five minutes nothing has happened. He goes to the bathroom and then to bed, put-ting his phone on charge – then all of sudden he is looking at his tablet and some new thing has happened and it starts all over again.
Russell has two uses for Twitter. One is simply a place where, as he puts it, he can tweet ‘absolute bollocks’ and the other is sheer foot-ball fanaticism, which links to any and every possible site that has items about the team he supports.
Craig, more conventionally, uses Twitter as his news feed. He fol-lows a thousand sites, but most of all things connected with the BBC such as technology news, political news and sports news. However, he also follows a BBC gardener and items on cricket, photography and airlines.
Another take on Twitter was represented by two people working in a shop who are quite techie. For them Twitter was important only at one moment during which it was new. They pride themselves in being in the vanguard, so that Twitter helped them confirm their skills when they became very early users. Yet once it became mainstream it held no such appeal, so they simply stopped using it.
This diversity in the use of Twitter across The Glades in part, of course, reflects the diversity of the village’s population and their various
interests. In one case it dominated that individual’s life, becoming some-thing of an obsession; in others it was a minor feature used for just one or two limited purposes. Yet all of this is what Twitter now is.