The power of social media

What use are social media? Are they any more than time-fillers for the chronically underemployed?

Personally I am sceptical about Facebook, which seems to be a platform for sharing hilarious cat videos and photos of your family with people who have little interest in either.

Though my wife seems to organise most of her admittedly limited social life through Facebook quite satisfactorily.

It’s more business-orientated equivalent LinkedIn delivers regular endorsements of skills you haven’t got from people you have barely heard of, plus valuable reminders to congratulate contacts on the anniversaries of taking up jobs from which they have long since been sacked.

To be fair, those of my acquaintance who have not rendered themselves unemployable through age, infirmity or incompetence tell me that it is a useful channel for both finding work and then recruiting younger and cheaper people to do said work for them.

Then there is Twitter, surely the greatest time-waster of them all? Tuned to the gnat-like attention span of the young with its ludicrously tight 140 character limit in which to convey your message, and full of inconsequence and bile.

Well no, actually, not entirely. As a much Tweeted Christmas card points out, in 2014 the angel of the Lord would find that his glad tidings of great joy were old hat to the shepherds, who’d already have read all about it on their smartphones.

Nearly every piece of breaking news in the last year has reached me through Twitter rather than broadcast media. Indeed on more than one occasion I’ve tuned in to the TV news to learn more about some event widely reported on social media only to find no mention of it all, as broadcasters presumably sought corroboration through official channels.

Then there is the great boon of enhanced customer service. Let me give you an example. At the beginning of December I ordered some parts to rebuild my elder son’s electric train set, after it had been comprehensively trashed by his younger brother.

I heard nothing for 10 days, so I sent a polite email and received, in return, an automated reply apologising in advance for the long delay I would experience before they got back to me, because they were frightfully busy. (The electronic mail equivalent of that maddening recorded message that begins “Your call is important to us …”. Only not important enough for us to employ enough people to answer our phones.)

So after a few more days I posted a Tweet containing the firm’s name and the words “shocking customer service”. Within half an hour I’d had a personal email from a director of the company (unknown to me, but acquainted with one of my Twitter followers) and very shortly after that my order was on its way.

All right, I’d jumped the queue and as an Englishman I naturally have my reservations about that, but it seems to be a trick that most of us can pull. Because every business cares far more about its public image than it does about you as an individual customer.

So complaining about your lousy train journey on Twitter is the equivalent of having your private conversation with Customer Services relayed over the tannoy at the Central Station.

Their Twitter feeds suggest that even notorious offenders like the energy companies are far more effective at dealing with complaints presented to them through Twitter than with those that arrive by more conventional channels. Which admittedly isn’t hard, since my experience of writing letters and sending emails to my electricity provider is strangely akin to dropping a brick down a bottomless well.

As I write I am still waiting to see whether Twitter will help me track down the important Christmas present that I supposedly signed for at 17.01 on Sunday, but which in fact never arrived at all.

Even if it ultimately fails, I know that both the sender and the courier are on the case, and I’ve been spared hours listening to hold music on the phone.

So give it a whirl yourself. Don’t say this column never tells you anything useful, and have a Christmas so merry you’ll want to go on Twitter to tell the world about it.

@keithhann

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The North East on TV: full colour yet still black and white

When I was a boy television was a tiny box offering two channels in fuzzy black and white for just a few hours each day.

You couldn’t even hope to watch it for a whole evening without fiddling around with the horizontal hold and worrying about the distinctive smell of valves overheating.

Now we have 24-hour, multichannel, high definition, full colour, surround-sound, widescreen broadcasting and the only thing still stuck in black and white is the opinions of the viewers.

I say this after puzzling over the very polarised reactions to the new BBC2 sitcom Hebburn, which strikes me (and, importantly, my non-Geordie wife) as one of the funniest things we have seen on the telly in years.

Hebburn's Big Keith. No relation, so far as I know.

Yes, it is a gross caricature delivering knockabout music hall one-liners, not a sophisticated, intellectual comedy. I might also think that it had failed to do my hometown full justice if I actually lived in Hebburn. The overall effect is a bit like Shameless starring a reincarnated Tommy Cooper.

Yet it is warm, affectionate and I find it very amusing. Indeed the only weak link to my mind is Gina McKee playing, as she always does, Gina McKee. But then that’s just my personal blind spot about a regional if not yet national treasure.

The Hebburn family of cliched but, to my mind, amusing stereotypes

What seems strange to me is that all the comments I have seen on the series are either wildly enthusiastic or totally condemnatory. There is no middle ground. This is true, oddly enough, even on the Hebburn Facebook page, where a minority apparently “like” the show just to provide a platform for sounding off about how hopeless the scripts and actors are, and attacking the inauthenticity of the accents and locations.

I might as well have thrown a strop about the episode of Vera that was partly filmed at Tod-le-Moor, just around the corner from where I live, yet dared to give the impression that this was a stone’s throw from the seaside.

Calm down, dears, it’s only television. A certain suspension of disbelief is required.

TV's Vera. Not at Tod-le-Moor.

I found exactly this same polarisation last week when doing some background research on a restaurant chain for which I supposedly work. Nearly all the reviews on those traveller guide websites are either five star, praising flawless food, locations, décor and service; or one star, suggesting that the self-same restaurant offers one of the worst experiences on the planet.

Years ago I noticed just this dichotomy in reviews of a hotel owned by someone I know. He let me into the secret. All the five star plaudits were written by his staff and friends, while all the damning reviews were planted by rival establishments in the area.

This, of course, renders such websites completely useless for the genuine seeker after truth, hoping to get an unbiased idea of whether a particular hotel or restaurant is worth booking.

How did everything end up so black and white? Partly it can be explained by the invisibility cloak of anonymity. Almost no one posts on review sites under their real names, so there can be no comeback however outrageously they express themselves.

Most people on social media sites do reveal their identities, but something encourages them to be far franker and ruder tapping away on their phones or tablets than they ever would be if they were speaking in public.

Is all this ultimately filtering down from our cherished but frankly increasingly wearing tradition of knockabout adversarial politics, now reduced to the chanting of learnt-by-rote dumbed-down catchphrases about the uselessness of the opposition?

In principle, I would love to see a more nuanced approach setting out the pros and cons and arriving at a balanced conclusion. Because the right answer is rarely black or white, but a shade of grey – and I am sure we all know how many of those there are around these days.

50 shades: what's all the fuss about?

Though in the case of Hebburn, I am happy to put my real name to saying it has cheered me up as much as anything on TV since the demise of Tony Hancock. Come on, trolls: do your worst.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Handwriting and thinking: on the way out together?

When I was a boy, people still let it be known that there had been a death in the family by keeping their curtains closed all day.

Last week, for the first time, I spotted someone announcing his mother’s death on Facebook. This is one “status update” it is clearly a breach of etiquette to “like”, despite the website’s inbuilt encouragement to be the first to do so.

At least this made me realise how very old fashioned I was to agonise for ages about whether I might compose a letter of condolence to a friend on my computer, rather than with pen and ink.

I do most things electronically these days. Where I would once have written a letter of thanks, I now invariably send an e-mail. But I had always drawn the line at expressing sympathy in print.

Partly lest it be thought that I had just cut and pasted my condolences from some previous missive, and partly because it seems rather insulting to address such an important issue in trouble-free laser print rather than painfully neat handwriting.

Pain, sadly, being the operative word. Years of abuse, scribbling rapid notes at meetings, have rendered my once award-winning italic script all but illegible, no matter how hard I work at it. I started sending out Christmas cards with a printed name and address after several people complained that even my signature had become such a scrawl that they had wasted valuable time puzzling over who the card was from.

So I gave in and sent a printed letter that was, I consoled myself, at least several times better than one of those ghastly printed “With Sympathy” cards.

Buy in bulk: there is sure to be another flu epidemic this winter

And a week or so later I was relieved to receive, by e-mail, a message from my friend thanking me for my “perfect” letter, so an unfortunate precedent has now been set.

Handwriting used to be such an important test of character. Many a promising relationship rapidly petered out when I discovered that a potential girlfriend was in the habit of adorning her vowels with hearts or smiles.

How will my sons manage without this quick and easy litmus test for lunacy at their disposal?

This is not to imply for a second that the so-called “science” of graphology is anything other than total bosh. I can state this with confidence because, a few years ago, a client submitted a sample of my own handwriting for such a test, and shared the results with me.

Apparently I am hugely talented and immensely ambitious, with the energy of ten normal men. Anyone who has read one of these columns, let alone actually met me, will know instantaneously that this is the absolute reverse of the truth.

Not only am I monumentally lazy, my attention span has also now atrophied to the point where I felt hugely proud of myself on Saturday when, for the first time in months, I actually sat down and read a whole book.

True, it was a rather short book written by someone I know, and based on a premise so outrageously untrue that I simply had read it.

Even so, where I would once have been literally unable to put it down, I felt obliged to take regular breaks to check the latest developments on my e-mail, Twitter and Facebook.

We are all becoming infantilised by this never-ending stream of news and the instantaneous, crude and usually cynical reactions to it. It now requires a real effort of will to pause, concentrate and really think about an issue before we pronounce on it.

Sadly precious few of our political leaders seem capable of doing so.

Perhaps it would be helpful to them and us if, every now and then, we pulled the plug on the constant storm of electronic chaff; turned our mobiles and computers off, and our minds on. Maybe we could draw the curtains, too, to minimise the distractions from outside.

After all, why should we wait for a death in the family to prompt us to reflect on what really matters? 

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Lost causes - from pork pies to Facebook via the dear old C of E

Now, children, for today’s quiz: what do pork pies, the Church of England, Coronation Street and Facebook have in common?

In the last two weeks, I have finally lost faith in all of them.

It all started with a pork pie – in the literal sense, not Westminster rhyming slang. For 20 years, I was principally employed to burnish the reputation of one of Britain’s largest food manufacturers, whose extensive product portfolio included the country’s leading pie brand.

Many times I proudly showed sceptics around the gleaming factory where they were produced, laying particular emphasis on the fact that the principal ingredient was good quality belly pork, and not the various unmentionables so often assumed.

Scanning the rather denuded shelves of a local shop for a quick snack lunch, and finding no sandwiches to my taste, I was pleased to pick up one of those reassuringly branded pies. My first bite contained a large lump of inedible gristle; my second a long auburn human hair. There wasn’t a third, nor will there ever be again.

Then the Sunday before last I was dragged, against my better judgement, to a christening contained within a “family service” at an Anglican parish church. My heart always sinks when I spot some grinning grey-haired loon tuning up his guitar at the front of a church, but this exceeded all my expectations.

First there were two non-hymns that combined no obvious religious sentiments with no recognisable tunes. Then we were enjoined to accompany a non-Bible reading about Samson with a variety of animal noises. After which, the harassed-looking lady vicar made for the front of the church for what I thought might be a sermon but proved to be the unveiling of a blackboard divided into squares and the joyous news that it was time for this week’s quiz.

I cannot say what happened after that as I was sitting in the sun out in the churchyard, feeling infinitely closer to God.

And lest anyone suggest that this hideous, dumbed-down farrago of a “service” was helping the young to appreciate religion, let me assure you that the many children in the congregation seemed to regard it with the same derisive bafflement as a landslide majority of the grown-ups.

The net result was to make me resolve not to bother christening my own second son. Trying to arrange this has in any case brought me close to despair, as various episcopal hurdles have been erected to prevent him from spending ten minutes by a font with a retired vicar friend and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Still, there was always Coronation Street to cheer me up. Until we made the fatal mistake of going to an arena in Manchester for the second (and, one can only hope, last) performance of the new musical based on the show: Street of Dreams. This combined a cringeworthy script that would have embarrassed a small hamlet’s amateur dramatic society with unmemorable songs and stumbling performances that were at least mercifully invisible from our top-priced seats, unless we looked at the projection on the giant screen above the stage – which surely rather defeated the object of putting on a live show.

Again, I fled at the first opportunity, but I find that the TV soap has also suddenly lost its appeal.

I would write about it all on Facebook, but Mr Zuckerberg’s hideous new Timeline has led me to pull the plug on that, too.

I expected my horizons to narrow as I progressed down the slope towards death, but if the things I once held dear keep going at the current rate I will just have to hope that my next church visit is not delayed too long.

And if the priest should diverge from the 1662 burial service to hold a little quiz, I can tell you now exactly where that muffled screaming will be coming from.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Singing the praises of the musical

I first realised that Simon Cowell had achieved world domination when I invited two cultured friends to an opera and they replied “We can’t possibly go out that night – it’s the start of The X-Factor!”

Even more amazingly, the opera concerned was one of those summer country house affairs, which means that Mr Cowell’s TV money-making machine must have been churning away every weekend from balmy late August through to polar mid-December.

The strangest thing to me was that I knew for a fact that my friends possessed one of those Sky Plus Box gizmos and could perfectly well have watched the show later, with the added bonus of being able to fast-forward through the ads. Apparently, though, it’s just not the same.

Indeed, for complete satisfaction I understand that you must not only see these things live, but share your views of them with the world every few minutes via Twitter and Facebook. A great service for the likes of me, because an occasional glance at these has enabled me to pretend to be in touch with what is going on not only on The X-Factor, but also The Apprentice, Strictly Come Dancing and I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here without wasting great chunks of my life actually watching them.

Not that I have anything against popular entertainment. I spent almost every evening last week glued to the unfolding drama that was the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street, even though ITV had done their utmost to drain it of any surprises by emailing me months beforehand with previews of their tram crash and details of which actors had decided to leave the series or been sacked by its new producer.

Only on Wednesday did I rely on my old-fashioned video recorder to keep me up to date as I slithered through the snow-covered streets of Jesmond to see the Royal Grammar School’s production of Oklahoma! A show I had always viewed with the utmost suspicion because it was my mother’s favourite, causing her to go slightly weak-kneed whenever Edmund Hockridge appeared on TV variety shows singing the one about the surrey with a fringe on top.

I had to dig my way into my house before I went out to the show

Hoping the performance would take my mind off the weight of snow on my conservatory roof

 In the early 1980s a production of Oklahoma! at the Palace Theatre tempted mum to visit London for the first time since she had accompanied her father there on a business trip some 60 years earlier. I took her to the show over my own dead body and absolutely loved it, and have been a keen fan of musicals ever since.

I have seen other professional stage productions of Oklahoma!, along with the classic film, but the energy and enthusiasm of the 16 to 18-year-olds of the RGS carried all before them. I sat with a big, silly grin on my face from the opening bars of the overture to the closing reprise of the title song, and drove home humming happily.

The brilliant cast ... and a probable breach of the Data Protection Act, now I come to think of it

A fortnight's snow layered like something out of a geology lesson

 Four days earlier I had spent rather a lot of money to see the glamorous diva Angela Gheorghiu perform the title role in the operatic rarity Adriana Lecouvreur to a packed house at Covent Garden. I enjoyed it, but Oklahoma! was infinitely greater fun – and yet there were empty seats in the RGS auditorium.

It is good to be reminded that there is a wealth of talent all around us, both amateur and professional, and that a live show on stage provides a true reality and immediacy that television can never match. So if your life is a desert now that The X Factor is over, why not try taking in a different sort of pantomime at your local theatre or village hall? You could even extend the slapstick beyond the stage by trying to use your iPhone to post irritatingly frequent updates on the performance for your followers on Twitter.

All together now: “Oh no, you couldn’t!”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The fine art of not giving offence

Last Wednesday, when I first heard about the dreadful events in what I still call Cumberland, I made two predictions: a knee-jerk reaction by the Government on gun ownership, and the cancellation of that evening’s climactic episode of Coronation Street.

I was delighted to be proved wrong on the first point. Tony Blair would surely have offered a moving soundbite followed by a variant on the last Prince of Wales’s hand-wringing declaration that “something must be done”. The polite version of David Cameron’s analysis seems to be the more realistic “bad things will always happen”. Though those Tory newspapers celebrating the move away from Labour’s nanny state should remember that the notorious Dangerous Dogs Act was a Conservative creation.

I did not really expect my other forecast to prove correct, and duly took my place on the sofa at 9p.m. only to find that Coronation Street had indeed been taken off the air. Though replaced not with solemn classical music but a repeat of Harry Hill’s TV Burp, which seemed a mildly eccentric way of showing respect.

I have pondered long and hard on the rights and wrongs of this, and read many of the comments on Coronation Street’s Facebook page following its non-appearance on Thursday and Friday as well as on the evening of the massacre. Most were written with the vituperative single-mindedness that seems to be the default setting of those moved to share their thoughts on the internet, and a clear majority were mightily hacked off to be deprived of their promised entertainment.

Sure, they conceded, it was bad luck that Corrie should have come up with a story line about a gun siege that reached its climax on the day of an actual shooting spree, but surely anyone could see that it was fiction, filmed months in advance, and bore no relation to reality?

Ranged against this view were those sensitive to the feelings of those directly affected by the Cumbrian tragedy, who clearly should be first in our thoughts. Oh yeah, came the heartless reply, won’t they actually have something better to do this evening than watching a TV soap?

The most telling comment I read was from an American, who simply observed that if the US networks started pulling shows every time there was a shooting, it was unlikely anyone would ever see a scheduled programme.

For once I do not have a strong view on any of this. My late mother took offence at most depictions of crime on TV, on the grounds that “it is just giving people ideas”, but if you follow that logic you would do better to ban the news than Midsomer Murders.

I do not for the life of me understand why TV and radio soaps have to be recorded so far in advance that it is all but impossible for them to reflect current events – though the dear old Archers occasionally tries, when a member of the Royal family drops off the perch or the nation is gripped by some natural disaster, and a brief conversation about it is clunkingly inserted.

I have no idea who is responsible for reading the national mood at our major broadcasters, and no understanding at all of the thought processes by which they deem some programmes to be unacceptable in the light of the news, while others that I find offensive at the best of times carry on regardless.

But if a gun siege at the Underworld knickers factory was too upsetting to be shown on Wednesday night, why was it OK for it be screened yesterday evening, presumably without being re-edited to show the gunmen realising the error of their ways? Those directly affected by last week’s events in the real world will never forget them. Do the memories of the rest of us really last just five days?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Perhaps finally starting to grow up

Precisely 95 years ago today, Britain blundered into a world war that destroyed much of the youth and wealth of the nation to little obvious purpose.

Now we are engaged in an equally pointless conflict in Afghanistan that has already lasted almost twice as long as the Great War, while the Government seems to be devoting more energy to clawing back the compensation paid to wounded soldiers than to providing them with the helicopters and bomb-proof vehicles they need to avoid death or injury in the first place.

“Lions led by donkeys” once again. Little changes, except that individual flag-draped coffins now come home in numbers that can be counted on one’s fingers, rather than thousands of corpses being dumped in mass graves overseas. This, at least, is progress, as is the greater awareness of what is being done in our name promoted by such developments as television, the internet and, yes, social networking sites.

Which is why I was initially puzzled when I heard reports of the Archbishop of Westminster’s interview on Sunday, apparently suggesting that such sites are practically works of the devil. Closer examination revealed that he was reacting to the suicide of a 15-year-old girl, allegedly in response to hurtful remarks about her posted on Bebo.

This is undoubtedly a tragedy, though I have to confess that it moves me less than the fate of our soldiers, whether in 1914 or now. And I cannot help wondering whether 20,000 British troops would have been sent to their deaths on the first day of the Battle of the Somme if they had been able to keep in touch with home through Twitter and texts, rather than just through censored letters and postcards.

I also cannot help feeling that, sadly, some people have always been pushed over the edge through bullying. Little changes. Where the Archbishop has a point is that it is undoubtedly easier to be cruel by proxy, on a website or by text, than it is to do so face to face.

Like many shy people, I took to email with great enthusiasm and would much rather communicate with friends or clients by that means than by telephone, failing the ideal of sharing a bottle of wine with them over a good lunch. There is none of that textspeak nonsense for me, of course. It is all properly written, capitalised and punctuated, and checked before despatch.

Yet it remains impersonal and close to instantaneous. There is limited scope for second thoughts, and the recipient finds it hard to detect the sender’s mood or tone of voice. I still shudder when I think of the time I reduced a lady journalist to tears with a few pertinent observations on a piece she had written, which could have been delivered without offence over the phone. Luckily she remains a friend.

Here, too, comparatively little changes. My grandfather, an Alnwick garage proprietor, destroyed the family fortunes with an intemperate letter to the press about one of his business rivals, which led to a crippling libel action. Apparently he never forgave my aunt for typing and posting it in accordance with his instructions.

Like most things, social networking sites can be life enhancing if used in moderation and with due care and attention to the feelings of others. The crucial objections, so far as I am concerned, are that many users clearly find them as addictive as Class A drugs, and that they can be the most colossal waste of time. That is why I closed my Facebook account a couple of weeks ago. So far as I can tell, none of my “friends” has even noticed and I feel a strange sense of liberation. I would say that I finally feel as though I have grown up, but it is clearly much too early for that.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.