We are what we tweet

LalitKModi was replying that day to one xxxDEVxxx from Bangalore,who after his regular dose of tweets to RahulBose1,Minissha_Lamba and CelinaJaitly,had dashed a query to the IPL commissioner: “Does Shashi Tharoor own something?” xxxDEVxxx is the Twitter handle of Karunakar Dev,a 19-year-old student who has never met LalitKModi. Dev’s days are filled with writing posts to Bollywood stars and checking his Twitter account every 15 minutes on his Samsung phone: he calls designer Farah Khan “Fa” and asks actor Vivek Oberoi to give a big hug. He is not Modi’s confidant except for exchanging one tweet before. Yet when Modi tweeted about Sunanda Pushkar,the tone was informal,almost as though he was speaking to a friend at a party and the tweet seemingly innocuous since the post did not mention Tharoor. But Modi had over 70,000 followers (at the last count,it was 78,189) and he had already tweeted the details of the IPL Kochi franchisee. He knew he was not having a quiet chat with xxxDEVxxx on Pushkar; the BCom student had just asked Modi a convenient question.

Twitter is the new space of communication that is apparently for personal posts about the movie you saw,the muesli you ate and your Monday morning blues,but a tweet,despite its extremely casual,abbreviated and personal character,is not a private tête-à-tête. A Twitter account,if it is not locked,can be accessed by anyone. Even so,it is not a genuine public forum. Here you can block an unwanted visitor and you don’t necessarily have to substantiate what you tweet. It is in this nebulous space that controversies and clarifications,nouveau fan clubs and news updates are born.

“If Modi wanted to leak the Rendezvous consortium’s details to the public,he would have found a way even without Twitter,” says Sumant Srivathsan,blogger and digital media professional. “That he used Twitter indicates a couple of things: that he is clever enough to understand the reach the medium has among an elite audience in India; that he is aware of the eagle eye the print and electronic media are keeping on Twitter these days; and that he might have been a little more careful if such a medium were not immediately available to him and might have saved him the trouble he’s gotten himself into,” he says.

Four years ago,when Americans Jack Dorsey,Evan Willams and Biz Stone started the microblogging site,the fears were something mundane — that the only people to put 140 characters to any use would be bored celebs telling us what they ate for breakfast. Crumbs of food still stick to some of the 55 million new messages tweeted every 24 hours by 106 million registered users,with 3 lakh users joining each day,but at its best Twitter can be like tuning into a station humming with swift updates and snappy conversation. In the summer of 2009,there was a Twitter revolution when tweeters across the world changed their settings to Tehran time to confuse Iranian censors,and protests against the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went viral.

In India,the controversy it creates is comparatively micro — and often generated by a handful of tweeters. When Tharoor aired his differences with the Home Ministry on visa restrictions (“Issue is not security vs tourism,but whether visa restrictions protect our security. 26/11 killers had no visas”) and actor Shah Rukh Khan took on the Shiv Sena over the ban on his film My Name Is Khan (“i may not have the same ideologies as the sena but on the question of me being a patriot,i dont think there should be any confusion”),they didn’t call a press conference as they would have a year ago; they whipped out their BlackBerrys and iPhones and sent out 140 characters into cyberspace. When author Chetan Bhagat whined about the “unfair deal” he got for the film 3idiots,which he said was “more than loosely” based on his bestseller Five-Point Someone,he first blogged about the betrayal and then took the battle to his Twitter: “They (filmmakers) added a story credit right upfront,without my name,negating my contribution. That is the issue.” In the beginning was the tweet,the headline and “breaking news” followed.

Much before Modi’s tweet on the Kochi consortium set the muckfest rolling,he had used Twitter to needle rivals in the Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) and snigger at the media (“why don’t they cover hockey?”). Shortly after the IPL commissioner’s posts on Kochi,a profile surfaced on Twitter with a single-point agenda: nail Modi. RCA secretary Sanjay Dixit,who goes by the handle dixitsanjay2005,held Twitter quizzes on the many skeletons rattling in Modi’s closet and accused Modi of impersonation,sabotaging matches and money laundering. Why Twitter? “I was inspired by Modi and his cheek,” Dixit said. “I used Twitter because the media follows it. After my tweet on April 12,newspapers contacted me and what I had to say did steer the debate. More importantly,Twitter is being used by the upwardly mobile section of urban India. And one communication on Twitter is equal to a thousand such communications (sic),” he says.

If you want to rake some muck,all you need is a smart #hashtag and a few hundred followers. “I don’t believe many of the issues that snowballed were worthy of controversy,such as Tharoor’s ‘cattle class’ troubles,or Shah Rukh’s MNIK issues,” says Srivathsan. “In a society that feeds on drama,many things that ought to be shrugged off are inflated into major issues to grab attention. For Shah Rukh,that is one way to drive audiences to his films,and for Bhagat to ensure that he has a captive audience.”
In a celeb-loving,paparazzi-lacking culture like India’s,mainstream journalists latch on to Twitter (as they do with some blogs) to get easy quotes and intimate tidbits about Shah Rukh,Modi and Co. And as Shah Rukh,Modi and Co expect,their tweets soon leave the social media to reach the mainstream media.

Twitter is many things to many people. It is a virtual constituency for Tharoor — if he got over 3 lakh votes in Thiruvananthapuram in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections,in Twitterananthapuram,he has twice as many followers,over 7 lakh. It is a business tool for companies. It is a fan club and PR machinery for Bollywood where actors with vainglorious handles like iamsrk,realpreityzinta,BeingSalmanKhan and iHrithik make selective tweets about their lives and carefully construct a Twitter persona. Much like people on the Facebook fashion a self on their profile with the books and movies they love and the photographs they put up,tweeters do it through posts.

And the followers of celebrities who daily scroll the timelines have reason to feel like an insider: Shah Rukh tweets about bathing with a German soap and tells them he is “very humble and quiet actually”,Preity Zinta flashes a dimple and says she is in fact single,Karan Johar says good night and asks for suggestions for the title of Stepmom’s remake. As the followers reply,retweet and regale,it seems like an exclusive party where you speak in mutant modern haiku. Pranay Srinivasan,a 31-year-old businessman from Mumbai,has just tweeted Shah Rukh on the match between Kolkata Knight Riders and Mumbai Indians: “The celebrities look like one of us on Twitter. And yes the followers get a voyeuristic pleasure.” xxxDEVxxx aka Karunakar Dev,who was astonished to see his tweet become a headline,says,“I admire most of these people and my favourites are singer Shreya Ghoshal and designer Farah Khan. When I get a reply from one of them,it gives a big satisfaction.”
Twitter is communication at its barest,often at its most banal,and yet it is here that an articulate writer-minister stumbled on his political gravestone. OMG!

RT: What the little bird is telling you
*Twitter is a free microblogging site where you post a message in 140 characters or less. The message will reach all those people who follow you. Your homepage,meanwhile,will be tweets sent by those whom you follow. Tweets can be sent from and received on your computer or your phone.
*RT or retweet (retransmit a tweet) is how Twitter users share interesting tweets from the people they are following. It accounts for much of Twitter’s viral power and how it can spread a link/piece of information to a large community in minutes.
*Twitter provides no easy way to group tweets or add extra data and a hashtag are a way out. It helps add tweets to a category and is a simple way to search for tweets with a common theme. Eg: #traffic,#tharoor,#IPL
*Why the name Twitter? In an interview to The New York Times in April 2009,co-founder Biz Stone said,“We had a lot of words like “Jitter” and things that reflected a hyper-nervousness. Somebody threw “Twitter” in the hat. I thought “Oh,that’s the short trivial bursts of information that birds do.”
*The Twitter bird is not the company’s official logo. Someone at Twitter spotted an illustration of a bird by a Japan based British illustrator Simon Oxley on iStockphoto. They paid usage rights and started using it as a decorative element on their website.