I have – quite reluctantly – left the social media platform X. In fact, I never really wanted to be on X (to be able to leave it): I joined something called Twitter, along with millions of others. Some people are defiantly calling it that still, but it isn’t that anymore. (I suspect readers of The Daily Herald did the same when their former Labour-supporting paper re-branded as The Sun, an event I just about remember.)
This is a sad departure for me because Twitter was intimately involved in some of my poetry. I first went on the platform under the guise of my fictional Belgian poet Rene Van Valckenborch – and he still has a microblog there (I lost access to it and therefore can’t deactivate it). I posted his so-called ‘Twitter Odes’ there (I also posted them here: here’s a few: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2010/12/twitterodes-35-42.html.
They appeared eventually in A Translated Man. But Van Valckenborch also invented the ‘Twittersonnet’ (140 characters and/or spaces (as it was then) divided into 14 lines of 10 characters each. There’s one of those in A Translated Man. But I couldn’t let my creature have all the fun. I wrote a series of ‘Twittersonnets’ about small things for a festival of small things at the Bluecoat under my own name. I actually set up my now deactivated account to post these little poems (I used ‘microbius’ as my handle because I imagined a younger brother to the Roman astronomer Macrobius who specialized in small things and was called Microbius; that must be my only ‘classical’ joke!) These poems are, appropriately, collected in my small volume of short poems Micro Event Space which I had fun ‘launching’ in micro non-event spaces, https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/robert-sheppard-micro-event-space.html and I thank Red Ceilings Press for this publication (still in print). Here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/robert-sheppards-micro-event-space-is.html. And here is one of them that was exhibited at the Blackpool Illuminations: Really: Pages: Robert Sheppard: My twittersonnet 'Dwarf Planet' is part of the KFS poetry illuminations in Blackpool. I think this image can be read, but I've added the poem (and another) below):
dwarf planet (pluto)
ice-coated
mountains
(30% H20)
polygons
by a whale
’s tail/cr
isp bald c
rust faces
redtipped
charon su
cking meth
ane/pebble
moons in
the kuiper
and here's another
lucretius
atoms make
space & t
hen discom
pose in mo
tion/littl
e letters
make words
& then re
contextual
ise atoms/
lettery cl
inamens li
ke ‘world’
to ‘word’
There’s another Twittersonnet in my 14 variations of Petrarch published as Petrarch 3 and republished in The English Strain. It will be my last.
OK back to Twitter-as-was. I left the account alone then, for a while, until I was talking about this very blog to the ex-Comms person at Edge Hill, Angela Samata (Merseyside Woman of the Year a few years back for her pioneering work in suicide prevention). And she asked what was the point of blogging if you didn’t tell people about your posts. Realising the truth of this, I set about using my Twitter account to announce new (and sometimes old) posts. I think it fulfilled that function – but I also found myself absorbed by the cut and thrust and to and fro of information and (deliberately fun) nonsense online. (As does Angela herself, by the way: I followed her.) Perhaps it now seems like an age of innocence. Eventually I had 1,500 followers and I followed 800. (I deliberately kept that number low to make it manageable.)
So why come off the platform?
The answer is, predictably, Elongated Muff as I call him (or would have, if he’d entered the carnival of grotesques in my now-completed ‘English Strain’ project along with Bo and Go and Fox and Dox).
This would-be Citizen Kane increasingly interrupts one’s posting with his increasingly conspiracy theorizing fascistic comments. When it came to the riots in Southport, he was reporting Civil War in Britain (which is at least hyperbole) and defending some of the rioters as being guilty only of posting on FB, when even they admitted – for example – criminal damage. An acquaintance of mine knows one Scouser that Muff was defending: the jokes around the pubs are that he’s going to get him out! He won’t. (The rioter was reportedly quite calm on the afternoon of the evening of the riots, but an afternoon and an evening is a long time to keep drinking, and he ended up chanting at and abusing policemen as the Spellow Library, to whose rebuilding fund I have contributed, burned!)
Technically, the Muff algorithm has made more of that conspiracy stuff arrive in my stream (or whatever it’s called). It’s not helped by followers of mine who attack these people; the only effect is that their monetized accounts are worth even more. So I am becoming part of, say, Lawrence Fox’s income stream if I repost his deliberately-constructed nonsense. Even more than that I was increasingly not seeing my followees’ posts; so my followers weren’t seeing mine.
So, I am – reluctantly – on Bluesky now, where, of today, I am following 115 sites, with 90 followers so far. I am at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social.
I’ve always avoided FB with my English temerity about what a ‘friend’ constitutes. But I might migrate. There is a bigger question about whether blogs are the dinosaurs of the internet. Coming up to my 20th year HERE (See post number one: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2005/02/editorial-to-third-series-robert.html) that’s an open question for now.
Until then, come and join me on Bluesky. It is rapidly growing and is benign so far.
