I’ve interviewed Charlie Brooker for the New Statesman print magazine, but there was a quote of his from the interview that was so righteous, I had to blog it. I asked him whether he was currently using Twitter much less than before because he’d gone off it.
He said:
I haven’t gone off it entirely. Because I’ve been so busy recently . . . When you don’t use it for a while, your brain calms down. So what I would do is lurk, and see what other people are doing . . . but when your rule is that you won’t write anything, it’s such a relief, it’s like when you really need a piss and you finally have one. It’s like that happens in your brain.
You can see everyone getting very excited about 20 things a day, and you think, “Oh god, I don’t even have to have an opinion about that or even care that it matters”. And you start rather arrogantly looking on and thinking, “Yes, you’re all excited about that, you won’t be in three hours’ time”. There’s a pressure – if you are actively participating in it – there’s a pressure to have an opinion on every incremental development on everything. And there’s instant scandals and instant laughing stocks or talking points. And I just . . . it started making me feel ill. By which I mean in the head.
You know that feeling you get – you’ll recognise this as a gamer – that feeling when you spend hours playing a game – hours and hours and hours, and then you realise it’s really late, it’s like 3 or 4 [am] and you’ve got to be up at 8, and . .. you notice daylight breaking and you feel sort of disgusted and hollow, because actually you’ve not really done anything constructive. You’ve saved the world. A world that doesn’t exist.
Yeah, I can feel like I’ve rewired my optic nerve when I finish playing Rock Band.
Yeah, well, Twitter is actually a lot like Rock Band, but instead of coloured bars coming towards you, it’s opinions on things. Topics. And there’s a pressure to respond. And then, the minute you stop doing that, you just think “oh, what is that about?” That makes me sound impossibly old. But I am.
Brooker has a new book out, by the way: I Can Make You Hate. It really can, you know.
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