BREAKING NEWS.....Ha, made you look!

Perhaps, it was post-election fatigue. Thanks to Twitter my index finger was, for a few weeks, in a state of cat-like readiness and is now permanently crooked, for optimal Twittering. Let's ignore the obvious feline evolutionary oversight; the index finger, and the inability of cats to type (generalisation) and focus on the crux of the metaphor: Tweeting in an illness, not a verb. Tweeting is apprehension. Tweeting is the need to be involved, to be heard, to be retweeted.


Watching the UK leaders' televised debates, I was merely a conduit for information. Through me it flowed, in real time, to the wider world, or to no one. Only later when I reviewed my tweets (does that sound dirty?) of the debates, was I able to formulate an opinion of who the winners were and who the ultimate loser was destined to be. I noted how different my conclusions seemed to be from the consensus. In the first debate, I thought Clegg's staring directly into the camera was creepy, I tweeted as much, but most made him the clear winner. Maybe I'm just not the hypnotising type. Look into my eyes...


I felt completely at one with Twitter during the election. Day after day, zinger after zinger, such as, "Cameron gets egged. Poor guy, last week he got Clegged!" or during the second debate, "Clegg: 'can we move beyond this political points scoring?' Someone should remind him where he is." I was at one with the world, a disharmonious voice in the chorus but a voice all the same. Into the infinite chasm, along with the chattering, tittering, twittering, the insightful and the snide, I cast something of myself. My message in a bottle, in a sea full of them, unsure if mine will ever wash up on some far off shore.


And then there was silence. Near silence. There were whispers and the odd light-bulb flickered into being, to cast a feint hue over the dark and largely vacant recesses of my mind. Perhaps it was a Yeatsian desertion. Perhaps they have all gone on holiday, it is the summer after all and thoughts and words and index fingers need rest.


Daily, global news stories broke. Sky News for example hardly had to repeat themselves from minute to minute as environmental disaster, political scandal and a military offensive against civilians ensured that  'Breaking News:', in alarmist yellow and black, kept us fixated. But I was powerless. All I could do was just sit there....and watch. No tweeting, no blogging, no facebooking. It was like I had gone back to the twentieth century. The pre-socionetworking, pre-fat-ass-ic period. Not quite the dark ages, I grant you. More of a gloaming.


Real people, with real names are so last decade. In another decade's time will this generation of social networkers name their children, @problogger Smith, or Jessica @applejuicesnap Murphy?


The good news is, I am recovering well. I kept my index finger elevated and my opinions to myself and who knows, someone, somewhere may even have noticed my absence. In Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod Beeblebrox is subjected to the torturous Total Perspective Vortex (TPV).

"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

Sound familiar? Twitter feeds the twenty-four hour news cycle, unfortunately it's a diet of mostly cheeseburgers and deep-fried Mars bars. It's not Breaking News, it's broken.