Once again four cabinet ministers debased themselves on the altar of Canberra’s tiny twitter community.
The self-promoters, the attention seekers and the griefers were out in force, as were the jokers. It was all one would expect from a community as self-regarding as Twitter.
Here’s a look at the tweets that caught my eye (taken from two different feeds which just about let me keep up but does look a bit funny).
They’re in chronological order, although vagaries of twitter and running two feeds means there might be some overlaps.
It started with the jokers.
In a channel with severe signal to noise ratio problems the ACT Secretary of the Labor Party lacked the judgment to not spam it with with irrelevancies.
And then these being twitter nerds there’s always someone with nothing better to ask about than Twitter.
As well as the Ministers, the communications chief Simon Kinsmore was answering questions on behalf of the ACT Government. (Which begged the question why not have more senior public servants involved?)
There being no end to the self-involvement of a Tweeter we were treated to that favourite of social media; eating.
At least Simon Kinsmore was getting rave reviews.
And there was no point in proceedings that the urge to retweet without thought to the channel could be resisted.
It wasn’t as if all the Ministers were so engaged they couldn’t go wandering offtopic with the herd either.
If there’s one thing Twitter is never short of is techno-utopians who think all the world is a nail to their ill advised hammer.
Offtopic chit chat is at least a great way to avoid the impenetrable questions of the mothering activists surrounding hospital policy.
Ooh look at me flooding a channel to retweet that something started some time ago.
Even Simon Corbell’s media adviser couldn’t resist screaming “look at me” while contributing nothing from holidays.
It seems Simon Corbell was off having his own discussions, but following #actvcc all you’d know was others asking him about it.
Joy Burch had a tenacious critic of the housing she was getting, which eventually lead to the “let’s take this offline” capitulation.
No question was too inane.
And all questions could be answered with variations on these answers: Soon, we’re thinking about it, it’s not our problem.
Like this response to the above.
Lardman, having found an audience, was waxing philosophical.
Twitter enthusiasts must evangelise at all times.
Every now and then a curly question was thrown up.
But relentless self promotion is a key characteristic of Twitter.
Social media loves talking about social media almost as much as mainstream media likes writing about itself.
And then the delusions of grandeur kicked in for sections of the crowd. If you want to be part of cabinet we suggest you get elected, form government, and get appointed to a ministry.
The griefers started getting abusive.
The Chief Minister did have a good answer to the cabinet wannabe.
The Twitter enthusiasts delusions of grandeur extended to moving the whole Legislative Assembly to their domain.
Predictably the mob thought this was a good idea.
Simon Corbell had his evasion down pat.
Paranoia set in.
Followed swiftly by self congratulation.
Twitter being quantitatively based rather than qualitatively, again sheer weight of tweets spammed into the #actvcc channel will probably be used to justify the process.
In its favour a small number of tweeters might feel as if they’ve been listened to.
It’s hard to say if that’s a good or a bad thing.
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