If Twitter were a boyfriend…

‘It’s a Rap’ Norah, @talentcoop, looked around the room, her eyebrows in the air. ‘That’s what we say, isn’t it?’

 It is and it was. And thus it ever shall be so. That’s the way films are made. Pop goes the weasel!

It sounds like I have written this before. And I had a mere two weeks ago. It goes like this. First there is a tweet, then a hashtag and before you know it, groups of strangers are bonding like newbies in a sorority club only instead of tackling mindless discipline tasks, these groups are running around trying to slot together a very important jigsaw. What jigsaw? The Jigsaw de Jour of course because it changes on a near daily basis.

Twitter is fast.

Two weeks ago 140 strangers convened in aDublinhotel to record a single for the neo natal unit inHolles Street, the national maternity hospital. We came together as a group and searched our twitter handles for familiar faces. The sheer size of the group meant the bonding took the form of fish shoals; we all moved in synchronised swirls creating a whole that was so much more than the sum of its parts. Afterwards on Twitter we carried on, repeating, retweeting and reposting our messages to each other and to our followers. We prayed a daily mantra of ‘Let’s trend now’, ‘let’s sell our #twitterxmassingle now’, and ‘Let’s get to number one now.’

Twitter is all about the now.

Interestingly for a social medium that might look on the face of it as a further reduction of human interaction, Twitter appears to be mixing the offline and the online with great aplomb. Stern images of people hiding behind machines, hunched over hot computers and avoiding human contact in favour of tags, emails, pokes and tweets may be misplaced. I personally have only really been active in Twitter for the past six months and already I must have met, face to face, in the flesh, out in the real world, more than 140 fellow tweeters and strangers. Strange that really. Flies in the face of logic really. Quite inspirational really.

If Twitter were a boyfriend, he’d bring you out to dinner, flirt with the entire restaurant and then before you’d had dessert, have shared a line of coke with the chef in the kitchen.*(PG) It’s just that social when tweeting with strangers.

Facebook, that other social giant, is all about friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and sometimes just people Facebook thinks are friends of friends.

 Twitter is all about engaging with strangers and making them friends.

So last week, another tweet went out and a very much smaller group of strangers met, this time in my mother’s house, which I’d very generously volunteered for filming purposes. Tweet went something like this: let’s sort out stigma surrounding depression; let’s provide immediate help over the dark season; and let’s put down some resources for further help.

A week later a script had been written, and tweaked and tweeted and twisted and turned. Casting decided. Crew elected. Makeup organised and food provided by the inimitable @mauradonohoe. I only single her out for selfish reasons. In the middle of all my tweeting and shoaling and singing and doing all the offline stuff that I had neglected before I got involved in the maelstrom of Twitter meetings, I’d kind of forgotten to go home and feed my children. Teenagers admittedly but while I regularly left out chops and pasta and pizza, I wasn’t actually home very much in the previous three weeks to cook it. So when the lovely @mauradonohoe arrived with beautiful lasagne and chicken bakes to my mother’s house and when it wasn’t all eaten, guess who carried it home to their children? Moi of course.

Twitter is very good for feeding teenagers with homemade dinners.

We spent the day filming. I even got a non speaking part as the mammy. I had not really thought about it prior to my arrival but once there I so wanted to be in front of the camera. Diva.com or is that #iwanttobeadiva? Either way, I got my wish and I have a very important non speaking part. Unless it ends up on the cutting floor of course.

End of part one

*In the Over18s version I think he may have shagged the female maitre d in the ladies bathroom which is a little too friendly for my liking, but Twitter just goes like that.

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