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How To Leave Twitter (2011)

by Grace Dent(Favorite Author)

3.26 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0571277748 (ISBN13: 9780571277742)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Faber and Faber

review 1: Madonna’s clever isn’t she? She made records like Vogue and Music with the title right there, repeating in the chorus. They aren’t great records beyond their 15 minutes of fame, but whenever some tired TV/radio journalist needs to run a news story about fashion or music, you can pretty much guarantee they’ll roll out those tunes in the background. Madge has presumably grown rich on the royalties. “Papa don’t Preach” and “Like a Virgin” are banished to drunken uncle dances at weddings, but Music and Vogue live forever. Similarly if you’re a journalist who’s acquired a sturdy following on Twitter in the UK, why not roll out a light-hearted book about the good and bad of the Twitterverse.Of course the thing is, to understand this book you will already ha... moreve to be using Twitter. It’s a particular kind of British insecurity that says “I’m already doing something, but I’d better check I’m doing it properly”, but there you go – guilty as charged. So for all the world wide capacity of social media, it’s fair to say this is very UK centred read – actually, let’s be honest, it’s a London media Soho/Shoreditch based read. You don’t have to follow many international tweeters to realise that a lot of her Twitter rules don’t really stand up.Mostly I’m a pro-Twitter person, I stumbled onto it a few months ago and realised that it was where all the smart people had gone when social media exploded (nice of them to tell me). When Myspace, Facebook and Tumblr were launching there Bonfires of the Vanities, Twitter quietly set up and provided an endless source of dialogue, articles, instant News, pithy one liners...OK and funny cat pictures. There is I think, a good book to be written about Twitter. Something between the crappy newspaper think-pieces about how social media is ruining social skills/grammar/spelling and a barely disguised PhD thesis in Media Studies that uses words like “trope” and “meme” one too many times. Unfortunately this isn’t it. What this is, one suspects, is the result of the second bottle at a publishing lunch, and then about a year later, a blind panic, a lot of crying and a rush to get something, anything in print. The acknowledgements give credit to a Julian Loose at the publisher Faber and Faber. I can only assume that Julian’s headless body currently lies in cement supporting a motorway somewhere, because I’m pretty sure that when the Literary Editors Union got a hold of this, the order for a hit went out pretty fast.The book has no structure. It’s barely 200 pages with some exceedingly generous spacing (like when you needed to make your homework look bigger). There are also lots of well spaced lists. Originally I thought that perhaps she had restricted herself to 140 character paragraphs, which would at least have been a novelty, but no such luck. Despite an absence of words, it still it manages to repeat itself on occasions. There’s one particularly awkward kettle/pot moment when Dent is talking about how novelty Twitter accounts seek out book deals…and you think…um yeah…I like Grace Dent. She’s hellish funny on Twitter, often writes very good journalism and I’ve just discovered from Goodreads that she’s written a whole bunch of award-winning teen fiction books; so I guess this isn’t even really her third-string job, and heck, she probably has a mortgage to pay. This would perhaps be a less bad book, if every so often you didn’t catch a glimpse of the talent Dent clearly is. Here’s the good stuff: (1) A few very funny jokes.(2) Some well observed stuff about the multi-window working desk life most of us now live.(3) A philosophical dip into whether a virtual friend is any less valid than a real life friend (not really).(4) Some good stuff about women on Twitter – the antidote to “women’s interest magazines”.(5) An interesting digression on the word “sassy” (Dent is anti-sass). …but that’s it.There, I saved you the price of the book – you’re welcome.Oh, it's not about leaving Twitter, Dent loves Twitter and so do I.
review 2: A funny rant about joining, using, and how to leave Twitter. I found towards the end I was losing interest, but it was funny in places, and raised a smile in other places. It is an accurate description of Twitter, and I'm glad I left Twitter a few weeks ago; and that's what made me pick this up at a local charity store for a pound. At 200 pages it's a short and light read. It's funny if you've experienced the same things Dent has, but Dent mainly just had a dig at other users. less

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