Graham Spiers: It’s a real treat to tweet, so try not to overdo it

Don’t wreck your life or your marriage – learn to keep your Twitter time under control, writes Graham Spiers

Twitter currently has 145 million users worldwide. The projection is that, such is global humanity’s desire to cheep away to each other about everything and nothing, a whole one billion of us will be using Twitter by the end of 2013. At the moment around 330 million “tweets” a day fly around cyberspace – a sum that is about to seem paltry given the avalanches of new users expected to come on-stream over the next 12 months.

For those of you not yet in the know, Twitter is a communications-medium whereby you can talk, jest or comment in brief soundbites – limited to 140 characters per time – for the satisfaction (or rage) of those who wish to follow you. It is a means of chatter, the spread of knowledge, opinion-making, self-promotion, plus various other sometimes dubious pursuits.

Twitter can be both banal and profound. In the banality stakes, for instance, Coleen Rooney, Wayne’s wife, famously tweeted: “I am waiting for a train.” On the other hand people comment on beauty, the arts, the loss of a loved one or spiritual experiences, all of which can be touching to read. The truth is, it is hard to define Twitter precisely, except to say that it is a phenomenal success.

So, confession time. I am on Twitter and I have to say it has been a mixed blessing. I have around 35,000 “followers” which, in the Scottish context, is probably fairly large, although that is not the half of it. With such a following there comes much fun, information and thought-provoking debate. But being a “sports pundit” I am also assailed and assaulted daily by a heady brew of abuse and verbal aggression from what I call “my angry mob”. On Twitter I have discovered fresh, ugly terms of hatred which, delivered in an acidic Scottish tongue, have certainly been an education.

It gets worse. Twitter, I believe, is also emerging as a relationship-breaker, even a marriage-wrecker. If you are not careful you can become a slave to it. You can be imprisoned by it. Your face can be glued to your screen for an hour at a time as you soak up the great tsunami of words and messages which surge your way. You can actually forget to live life.

In my case I receive a regular flow of queries – maybe about football or golf – which people often demand I respond to. In many cases I want to, because interesting points have been raised. Even in the aggression stakes, if I am in a spiky mood, I will tell some raging, half-literate football fan where to stick it, normally with the closing barb: “And away and learn to spell.”

But the point is, if I am not careful, I can become another Twitter-victim, which is to say, you forget to lead your life and love your children because you are so engrossed in the constant, updating debate.

My wife thinks Twitter is one of the revulsions of the modern information age. She detests it and thinks it “vile”. Twitter has caused intermittent tension between us because, every time she sees me skulking off to “do some work”, she suspects (rightly) that I will spend a portion of that time attending to Twitter matters.

I have even taken to sneaking off to the loo with my smartphone so that I can cram in maybe 10 minutes worth of tweeting in the utter privacy of that marvellous place, the bathroom. “Where the heck are you now?” my wife will yell, as our children’s food is being lobbed around the kitchen, while I dodge the flying mince and custard in order to send out some crucial, world-saving tweets.

Last week, in one such loo foray, I’d forgotten that we had just ten minutes for all of us to get out of the house and into the car – five of us – to go to a party.

Sat in there, out came the phone and the amiable thought: “I wonder what’s happening on Twitter?” I got so engrossed in it – in the Rangers FC debate – that I quite forgot where I was and what else was happening.

“We are bloody waiting on you!” my wife cried, coming stomping back into the house. “Coming, dear, just coming,” I replied. “Bit of trouble in here. Damn that curry.” She wasn’t buying it.

Twitter can also, if mis-used, eat away at your intellectual development. I’ve noticed this with younger journalists in particular who, rather than read a book or a magazine article, will simply gaze at their phone for hours and hours in the aimless, effortless way that Twitter invites you to. On trains, on buses, why bother nourishing your brain with fine prose? Instead, just clack away gormlessly, as in: “There’s a bloke sitting to my left who is wolfing down a chicken sandwich…”

I now make a point of trying to limit my Twitter activity to maybe ten-minute bursts, say, three times a day. On some occasions, of course, something mega will be going on, and a good 45 minutes can be spent sparring away. But I’ve learned (I hope) to be less of a Twitter victim, especially when my life out there is to be savoured. In fact, a rediscovered joy of mine, on occasion, is not to go near Twitter for fully 24 hours. Yes, a whole 24 hours!

Used properly, Twitter can be helpful and hugely enjoyable. There is, too, a certain art to being able to convey articulate or pithy feelings in such short sentences. Not for nothing does the barb or even clipped polemic work well in its medium.

And Twitter has made everything instant. Via tweets, everybody knows just about everything that is going on in the world, just moments after it happened. Twitter is now even defeating the “live” broadcasters for pace.

So, if you see me sneaking off to the loo, please don’t harass me. I’m trying to concentrate in there.

• Follow Graham Spiers at: @GrahamSpiers And The Scotsman at: @scotsmanpaper