Caitlin Moran, photographed earlier this month. Photograph: Kellie French/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Caitlin Moran, photographed earlier this month. Photograph: Kellie French/The Guardian Social media Caitlin Moran: social media went from utopia to hellhole in a decade – if you want to feel hopeful again, get offline Fourteen years ago, Twitter was the fastest, funniest game on the web. Now I’ve been driven out by so-called ‘online activists’. The only answer is to unplug and try this instead
Prefer the Guardian on Google Let me take you back to December 2012 … God, I love social media! I cannot believe my exquisite luck – to exist in a time when it was invented! Bliss it is in this dawn to be @live! If you’ve not been on Twitter yet – please join! It’s kind of like a cross between your best ever pub, and the bit on Live & Kicking where celebrities like Duran Duran were doing the phone-in, and you could ring in and talk to them. Literally! Because Duran Duran are on Twitter! Well, Simon Le Bon is. And Spandau Ballet, too! Well, Gary Kemp. And they’re really funny. During the royal wedding with Kate and William, when all the lesser royals were herded on to some shitty coaches, Kemp was horrified.
“Spandau would never have got into a coach!” he posted sniffily.
“Yeah – limos all the way for Duran,” Simon replied, with palpable distaste.
For a certain kind of person – by which I mean someone raised on Smash Hits magazine – the idea of Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran doing live, bitchy commentary on a royal wedding, on a new communication device in your pocket? This is all our dreams come true.
But it’s not just Camp Old New Romantics Tweeting During a Royal Wedding, though. It’s also a community. Everyone’s so nice on there. Everyone is their best selves. Last year, there was a mother in Welwyn Garden City whose child had lost its teddy bear. She was, understandably, desperate to get it back – begging everyone to keep an eye out for it on the streets.
Obviously, everyone reposted her tweet, and it went super-viral. Then the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, got involved. He wrote a little poem about the bear! And then that went viral! Because everyone really wanted to find that bear! And, by the end of the day, the bear was found – and it was like a breaking news event, but with actual good news. Everyone went bananas!
For a certain kind of person – by which I mean someone who wishes our newspapers and news bulletins contained more good news – it’s like a dream come true. Online, every day has a moment where it feels like It’s a Wonderful Life .
But the thing is – the fun and the community of Twitter aren’t even the best bit. No! Because the killer thing is: it’s kind of like the revolution on there. Seriously. For the first time ever, people can communicate with each other, across the world – unmediated by newspapers or TV. We all have the power to broadcast, and be heard, now. And do you know who’s basically taken over Twitter in the UK? The women. They’re on there, every night, reviewing the state of feminism through the day’s media – and being Chris Morris-level amusing about how ridiculously male-dominated everything is. And, gradually, they’ve got so pissed off about it, it’s turned into action.
At the time I thought, we all have our hands on the levers of power, now Twitter is here. This is the future! This is true equality! We can all be activists now For instance, this year, after the Today programme had two…