Old Twitter: A Close Reading of a Newspaper Story from 2009
On the 8th January 2009, on the way home from work, a small story in the Metro caught my eye enough that I thought it was worth taking a photo.
Its a cropped photo from an iPhone 3G (the latest iPhone at the time, when phone cameras weren't as good as today) so a bit fuzzy; the article reads;
ROSS AND BRAND A PAIR OF TWITTERS
JONATHAN ROSS has boasted about a rude text from Russell Brand on Twitter. The shamed TV host used the networking website to let fans know about a message from the comedian. he wrote: "Just got text from Russell B – I wish I could repeat it but I'd get banned from Twitter. Bad Brand. But funny."
For context; this was during the Sachsgate scandal1, a few weeks before Ross' 12 week suspension without pay from the BBC was due to be lifted. That meant that Ross was in the middle of the ongoing hostility from newspapers toward the BBC, which meant that pretty much anything he did at the time was 'newsworthy'.
For example, the Daily Mail published a story on the same day, which was essentially "Wossy goes out in a tracksuit". So a story about Ross and Brand as well as a new 'hot' internet thing would probably have been a no-brainer for a newspaper editor to report on - especially if it suggests some sort of 'naughtiness'.
What seemed weird to me at the time (weird enough to warrant taking a photo of the story) was a funny feeling about something that was pretty trivial on Twitter the day before being somehow worthy of reporting in a national newspaper the next day. I remember being aware at the time that the Sachsgate scandal wasn't really about people being outraged by what they had heard on the radio, but being outraged by what they had read about in the newspapers - and the fact that Twitter was this new 'direct' channel that anyone (including celebrities) could use to essentially bypass the 'media', but somehow also become the topic of a 'media' story was... weird.
Consider that to run that Daily Mail tracksuit story, there would have needed to be a photographer sitting outside Ross' house on that day, ready to take the pictures. (Without the pictures, it wouldn't have been much of a story). That photographer would need to be paid - not just for the day, but for each day that he was sitting there where he didn't get photos/a story worth publishing.
But in a post-Twitter age, all it took was someone watching @Wossy's Twitter feed (and, presumably, a curated list of other celebs and noteworthy individuals on Twitter). That approach would have changed in the months/years that followed, as it became clearer that "celebs on Twitter" wasn't so much the source of stories as "everything on Twitter" - by 2013, Lord Rothermere was talking about how Twitter had become a primary source of material for the Mail properties, and that the goal was to turn "news" happening on Twitter into a Mail Online news story within 3 minutes. (Source)
Anyway - Twitter doesn't make finding an actual tweet from 12 years ago very easy; particularly when it turns out that its been misquoted - as is the case here. In fact, what @Wossy posted was two consecutive tweets (well before threads were a function of the site);
Twitter's advanced search does let you look for tweets from a particular account on particular dates though - it seems that getting more of his friends on Twitter was something that Ross was tweeting about a fair bit at the time. (Also, verifying which were real/fake accounts - this was a few months before blue ticks started appearing)
Its also worth noting that @RustyRockets joined Twitter in January 2009 (ie. within weeks of texting Ross saying that he doesn't know what Twitter is.)
The next day, when I was in the office, a full page story in a different newspaper (this time the Star) caught my eye. This was essentially the same story - more or less - but now two days after the actual tweet, and expanded to a full page (with an accompanying picture of Britney Spears, for reasons that aren't at all obvious to me) with a bit more of an explanation of what Twitter is.
I think I had meant to write a blog post about them at the time but never got around to it - I came across the photos while looking for something else recently, and thought that in the spirit of McLuhan's Mechanical Bride, I'd try doing a close reading of the article.
Celebs hooked on social networking site
Now Wossy Starts Flashing his Twitts
"Twitts" is a weird word to read in a headline - back then, they were still called tweets - but 'twitt' obviously has a more negative tone, in fitting with the central Jonathan Ross story. (As well as the "twitts/tits" wordplay- the Daily Star was described by its subsequent owner as "mostly a sordid product that objectified women and obsessed over reality TV.")
The article sets the tone from the start;
SHAMED Jonathan Ross has turned into a really big Twitter during his BBC suspension.
He has become addicted to the social networking site, posting up to 23 updates a day.
I just checked, and the @DailyStar Twitter handle wasn't registered until February 2009 (a month after this story was published) and has posted more than 23 'updates' in the last hour alone. In a "pre-Twitter" era, 23 updates in a day certainly seemed like a lot - today, it just sounds trivial.
The telly [can't read this word - "host"?] who calls himself "Wossy" on the site, posts regular updates to his "followers".
The odd use of quotation marks around "followers" tells us that the reader needs to be told that this is a use of the word that is particular to Twitter. But it also - perhaps inadvertently - seems to suggest that there is something strange about his 'followers', in that they would want to be reading up to 23 updates a day from "Wossy". (Obviously, in stark contrast to reading about it in a newspaper...)
It reminds me of a Douglas Adams column from 1999, where he talked about the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.
(Also - today, we would probably simply say that his Twitter handle is @Wossy - the word "handle" and the "@" sign weren't yet common convention.)
And he is one of a growing band of celebs, including Stephen Fry, 57, Britney Spears, 27, Andy Murray, 31, Jummy Carr, 36, John Cleese, 69, and Will Carling, 43, who use Twitter.
(I'm not sure if its still a thing, but it certainly used to be a UK tabloid newspaper convention to state the age of any celebrities mentioned in an article.)
Anyone who was paying attention to Twitter in 2009 wouldn't have been surprised by Stephen Fry's inclusion in the list (fun trivia: he was my first follower when I joined Twitter - back in the days when it was considered polite to follow back, no matter how famous you were.)
Britney Spears inclusion also makes sense - she was, at the time, Twitter's most followed user (before Ashton Kitcher overtook her in the race with CNN to be the first account with a million followers). Unfortunately, The Star seems to have missed the opportunity to add something more to the story as Britney Spears' twitter account had been hacked just a few days earlier. Perhaps that would have cluttered up the story a little too much.
I'm not really sure why Andy Murray, Will Carling, Jimmy Carr or John Cleese made the list.
Ross, currently suspended by the BBC over the "Manuelgate" scandal with Russell Brand, boasts about mundane things like the cold weather and having to give up Twittering to attend a meeting about his comeback show.
"Boasts" seems like an odd word to use to describe tweets - it seems to say more about the attitudes of the journalist/editor than it does about Ross or Twitter. But it is worth remembering that at the time, it did seem to many people that posting whatever was on your mind to Twitter or a blog was an arrogant thing to do - ie. to assume that there were people who would want to read your 23 updates a day. (I was in a kind of 'digital evangelist' role at the time, encouraging people in the agency to try out things like blogging, so I was pretty familiar with that kind of "why would anyone want to know about what I had for breakfast?" resistance.) What it misses - which seems obvious in retrospect - is that the idea of Twitter isn't that you're interested in reading @Wossy's 23 updates that day, but that you're interested in what everyone you follow is talking about right now.
He also complained how cold his plush north London mansion is. He wrote "Am going to try to get through the whole day without mentioning how freezing it is.
"Oh, bad start. I am wrapped in a blanket and have two dogs on my lap, but still cold."
Temperatures at the time were -10C in central/south England; I think its safe to say that it wasn't only Ross' "plush north London mansion" where it was cold at the time. Again - that issue of perspective; was he complaining about his 'mansion' being cold, or was he commenting on the same weather than most of the UK (and therefore, presumably, most of his followers) were also experiencing at the time?
Then we get to the meat of the story - the evidence of Ross and Brand's continuing friendship, despite the trouble they had got each other into;
Ross, 48, was suspended from his £6million-a-year post in October after leaving sick messages on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs, 78. But he still appears to find pal Brand amusing on Twitter.
He wrote "Just got text from Russell B – I wish I could repeat it but I'd get banned from Twitter. Even I gasped. Bad Brand."
This is a slight different paraphrasing of the same two tweets as the Metro story (which omitted the "Even I gasped" sentence.)
The dad-of-three has 5,737 followers on the site and on one day he sent 23 posts, beginning at noon and ending at 9pm.
One rant was a moan he had to go offline to attend a meeting ahead of his return to BBC1 on January 23.
He wrote "Have meeting now so will have to shelve the debunking for a while."
Again, its weird to think of someone writing exactly how many Twitter followers someone has now- its virtually guaranteed to be out of date by the time the article went to print, let alone when it was being read the next day. Maybe this highlights the disconnect between traditional media and 'new media', and the 24-hour news cycle that was essentially broken by digital media.
It's kind of hard today to imagine a notable celebrity with less than 6,000 Twitter followers when @barackobama has 127 million, but it was a fairly big number at the time. (Obama himself had less than 60,000 followers in 2008, and it was still some months until Ashton Kutcher would become the first Twitter account with a million followers).
(I'm pretty sure that talking about how many posts a day, and the times of the first and last ones seemed just as trivial at the time though.)
The article closes with a brief explanation of what Twitter actually is;
Twitter, which started two years ago, is currently the hottest networking site on the web. It allows notes of only 140 characters, meaning Twitterers have to keep everything short and to the point.
Co-founder Biz Stone has compared Twitter to "flocks of birds – the way they are able to move around an object in flight".
He said: "It looks so choreographed, it looks like it's planned out ahead of time but it's not.
"It's just rudimentary, simple communication among individuals."
I think the noteworthiness of this is simply the fact that a full-page story about celebrities on Twitter still needed to include an explanation of what Twitter was - ie. the implication that a reasonable proportion of readers would otherwise be unable to properly understand the story. (Also worth noting that the only point in this description that doesn't really work today is the 140 character limit, which was doubled in 2017.)
Footnotes/Conclusion
A couple of months later, I wrote a piece for my agency's thought leadership programme about Twitter: The New Word of Mouth. Looking back, I'm pretty embarassed about some of my data visualisation (in particular the 3D bar charts), but one of the charts shows the explosive growth that Twitter was going through at the time - from only a few hundred thousand visitors in December '08 to over 2 million by February 2009. This newspaper story was written just as the initial explosive growth of Twitter was taking place.
Twitter was - obviously - a very different place in 2009, and while I think it was fairly easy to talk about the potential that it had for celebrities (and non-celebrities) to talk directly to 'the public' without the traditional intermediaries of newspapers, television stations, magazines etc., it was also pretty much impossible to have any idea of what the broader consequences for that would be. "Being famous for being famous" is a much broader societal trend that obviously predates Twitter, but its hard to imagine today's world of YouTube/Instagram/TikTok 'celebrities' developing without Twitter first paving the way. Perhaps if Twitter had decided on a business model other than paid advertising (Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends didn't appear until 2010), the 'influencer economy' would look very different.
Then, of course, there is the impact of Twitter beyond the 'celebrity' world. A few days after the Star published this story in January 15th, Twitter started to show itself to be a much more interesting platform for news and journalism than the Star could have forseen when a US Airways plance crash-landed on the Hudson River in New York, and the story broke on Twitter before any other news service (while the FlightStats information website was still showing the downed flight as 26 minutes late, but still ‘en route’ to its destination of Charlotte in North Carolina.)
Although Barack Obama was already using Twitter as a campaigning platform, it was in March 2009 when Donald Trump signed up to Twitter, and a few months later in May when he posted his first Tweet. (Or at least, his account posted its first tweet - apparently it wasn't until 2013 when he would first post to his account himself.)
Twelve years, two elections and one insurrection later, he was banned from the platform - meaning not only that he cannot post but also that we can't go back to read any of his 46,919 tweets. But that itself has also marked a shift in perception around social media platforms - the question about whether freedom of speech extends to 'freedom' to post messages on a privately-owned online platform, or the obligation of those platforms to push those messages to other users ("freedom of speech' versus 'freedom of reach'.)
Twitter's 'role' in the world has changed - I think TikTok is now the place to go for the memes, Instagram is the place to go to get 'access' to celebrities, but I think Twitter is still the place many people tend to turn to find out about what is happening right now - whether that is in a 'discovery' sense (ie. "I wonder what is going on in the world?") or in a 'research' sense (ie. "Why have a couple of hundred people just marched up to this particular building in London?"). I think its also still the 'public square'-type place people go to discuss the stories of the moment - although I do get the impression that different political groups are approaching different platforms in different ways; it isn't as clear as it used to be that Twitter is really a politically 'neutral' platform (I guess Donald Trump's banning is a big part of this). I've seen people sharing stories about planned protests that explicitly state to NOT 'post on Twitter or Facebook about this before the event'. But while Twitter's 'cultural status' might not be as clear, there isn't really an obvious replacement, in the way that Facebook seemed like a 'replacement' for MySpace when it was on the rise (and Twitter was seen - by some - as a likely contender for Facebook's crown when it was in its ascendency.) Its biggest problem - which is also in many ways its biggest strength - is that it isn't anything in particular; its still a little bit of everything, all of the time.
Just like the internet.
-
In a nutshell; a prank call by Ross and Brand on air on Brand's BBC Radio 2 show 18th October led to a Mail on Sunday story on 26th October which amplified the controversy, leading to Ross being suspended without pay from the BBC for 12 weeks. Apparently two complaints were received the day after broadcast, one of which referred to the calls. By the 27th, 1,585 complaints had been received by the BBC. By the 30th, it was 37,500. ↩