Hello reader, how are you doing?
Let me ask you something. Imagine you're going out to meet a
friend for dinner. You arrive at the appointed time, on the dot,
because you believe punctuality is a virtue. Sadly, your friend
does not share your passion for timekeeping and is nowhere to be
seen. At ten past, he or she has still not shown up. What would you
do, reader? Some would text their friend, I imagine, to ask what is
keeping them. Others would just wait patiently. But many of you, I
highly suspect, would open their Twitter app and write something
irritated or witty or whimsical relating to this predicament.
Because Twitter is addictive and once you're in Twitter's birdlike
thrall, it becomes difficult to do anything, even something as
mundane as wait for a friend for a few minutes without needing to
tweet about it.
If this sounds familar to you, chances are you will enjoy
columnist and author Grace Dent's new book How To Leave Twitter: My
Time as Queen of the Universe And Why This Must Stop, published by
Faber this month (£7.99 paperback; £4.99 ebook).
It's a quick, funny read, as you might expect. Twitter users
will find themselves nodding in recognition as Dent runs through
the types that you come across on the hugely popular social
networking phenomenon (it has over 200,000,000 registered accounts,
incredibly). Dent also describes with some palpable sympathy the
way celebrities are treated by other users, how to recognise
dependency and, of course, how to leave. As someone who uses
Twitter for work and had, until very recently, a personal Twitter
profile as well, I could spot a lot of truth in How To Leave
Twitter. It's often very amusing as well. I'm not sure how much a
non-Twitterer would get out of it, but I suspect it's primarily
aimed at the addicts among us, anyway, so who cares? It's a good,
fun way to while away an hour or two between tweets.
Buy How To Leave Twitter at amazon.co.uk
