Professor Green
“JUST brushed my teeth”. “Nearly 12 hours kip. Wowzers.” Neither of these things is interesting, insightful or particularly funny. Yet these are things I’ve said, online, on Twitter, in recent memory, to my two-million-plus followers.
What makes this worse is that people, in their hundreds, and sometimes thousands, have retweeted and favourited them over and over again, thereby spreading the inner inanity of my brain even further than it warranted in the first place. It’s fine to bore ourselves, but must we continually bore everyone else, too?
So: Dear the internet, I’ve got an announcement to make. I’m having a reboot, a digital do-over. I’ve been on Twitter since January 2009 and I’m tired of the digital diarrhoea that has spewed forth from my fingers in the 140 format. Over the last five years, I’ve tweeted more than 54 000 times – an average of 27.47 times a day.Call me if you want to catch up.
I’ve done a lot of my growing up in public; I’ve wrestled with a lot of demons, come to terms with many life-altering experiences and got married – most, if not all, of which has been documented in some way shape or form on the internet.
When I’m 80 years old, sucking soup through a straw and my great-grandkids are scrolling through my timeline, do I want them knowing I told two million people that I took a s**t at 4pm on a Thursday? Not really.
I complain a lot, which is perhaps a birthright of mine as a British citizen, but is Twitter the place? How something is interpreted often has as much to do with the person reading it and their mood when reading.
I want to use Twitter differently and I want to use it less. It has become a tic, an uncontrollable impulse. I check my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and e-mail so many times a day that I’m scared to count.
Twitter isn’t the problem. Used correctly (step forward Stephen Fry), it’s a brilliant platform; it’s just that many of us use it incorrectly. We spew forth the mundane. We follow people we have no interest in. We’ve allowed it to take away, ironically, our “IRL” (“in real life”) experience. There’s now a generation of kids watching an entire gig through their phone.
The loss of grammar via social media and texting also bothers me. I left school in year eight, aged 13, so I’m no grammar Nazi. But basic punctuation seems to evade most people. While my nan was out working three jobs, my great-grandma Edie, who since died, would read to me every day. This provided me with amazing memories and meant I associated reading with warmth and love.
Can grandparents or great-grandparents relate to kids with Minecraft? Admittedly, I don’t read as much as I should now because I’m taking pictures of everything I eat, when I could have read The Goldfinch and tweeted about that instead.
It’s time to be more considered. Instead of sitting on my phone, I’m going to do things that benefit my mind; read a book, go to an art gallery, meet a mate for coffee. That’s where my head is at.
It’s the same with everything in life, balance. I hope, with this reboot, I can find that balance and, finally, read a good book. I think Edie would like that too. – The Independent
l Professor Green (Stephen Paul Manderson) is a British rapper and singer-songwriter.