I Hate Mornings

On the way back to Oxford on Friday we stopped in at Xander’s parents’ house, where I found myself trying to explain what TEDxTuttle was. “It’s a combination of TED and Tuttle”, I said. “Oh.” On Saturday I ran into Wes and Dave (fellow Torchboxers) at Greens Café. “So what exactly was this TEDxTuttle thing?”, they said. I think it’s time for an explanation that makes sense to you (and not just the people who were there).

TED

TED is a conference where massively successful people give 18-minute talks and everyone schmoozes. It costs thousands to attend. People tend to either give inspiring talks on success and creativity, or demonstrate some futuristic technology.

The most important thing about TED is that all the talks are filmed, and the videos are available online for free. It’s an amazing resource which you should definitely check out. It beats watching reruns of Dragon’s Den on iPlayer.

Tuttle

Tuttle is a ‘loose association of people’ with an interest in social media. The Tuttle Club meets every Friday morning at the ICA (10-12 in the bar). Anyone can turn up. There are usually between 50 and 100 people there, most of whom are wonderfully interesting. There’s no structure (Lloyd welcomes people at 11, but that’s it). People talk.

The most important thing about Tuttle is the connections that are made there, all under the watchful eye of the Tuttle’s ukulele-playing curator, Lloyd Davis. All the interesting online stuff I’ve done in the last year has been somehow connected to Tuttle.

TEDxTuttle

TED is huge. They run international spin-off conferences, and have speakers like Al Gore and Bill Clinton. This year they launched TEDx, which gives any group the opportunity to organise their own TED event. There are some ground rules, and the events are filmed and submitted to TED.

So TEDxTuttle was 90 people (some Tuttlers, some not) in a conference centre at Monument. We watched some TED videos, we listened to some speakers, we drank coffee and chatted. I gave a talk on Babble + Context = Conversation, including live performances of a few of the Tweet Suite movements, and sang the Twitter song.

Photos, blogs etc.

Being a social media event, there was plenty of coverage online, both live and afterwards. Here are a few highlights:

• Adam Tinworth was liveblogging. He covered Maggie Philbin on Tomorrow’s World, Rachel Armstrong on The Future of Buildings, Lloyd Davis on Tales of Tuttle, me on Twitter(ish) and Mat Morrison on Measuring Social Media.
• Benjamin Ellis took some great photos of TEDxTuttle (a couple of which I’ve used on this post under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
• Andy Roberts posted a quick blog about Rachel Armstrong’s talk on ‘living architecture’ (including a video of Rachel from a previous event explaining her work with protocells).
• Jennifer Jones blogged about TEDxTuttle from an outsider’s perspective.
• Alan Patrick (who organised the event) wrote up his thoughts about the TEDxTuttle event and all the talks.

There was an awful fuss last week about a company that analyzed Twitter and decided that 40% of it was ‘babble’. As it turns out, their client Philtro is a piece of software that filters Twitter, and their methods of analysis were laughable. To make matters worse they behaved like idiots in the aftermath, with wonderful comments like “If nothing else comes of our research, at least I know that Twitter is really full of self important people who have way too mcuh [sic] time on their hands.”

The fiasco prompted some interesting, thoughtful and occasionally inspirational blog posts from Twitter sympathisers, the best of which was a post by @glinner called The Conversation. It is in fact a direct response to yet another badly-researched Twitter piece in the broadsheets, but it presents a good answer to the ‘babble’ accusation:

…we are communicating with each other on a platform that encourages good manners, that rewards us when we’re interesting and lightly smacks our hand when we’re not. For the first time in history, the human race is having a global conversation, and despite all our differences, we actually seem to be getting on quite well.

Twitter is all about context, and that’s what you can’t see from the outside. Let’s take the classic ‘what I had for breakfast’ tweet:

Avocado on toast. Breakfast of champions. @aliteralgirl

This tweet is not:

• newsworthy;
• literary genius;
• life-changing;
• hilarious;
• sponsored by the Avocado Board with support from the Olympic Committee;
• inciting hatred;
• illegal.

Neither is it:

• boring;
• pointless;
• narcissistic;
• laughable;
• ridiculous;
• a sign that society is doomed.

But it is:

• cute;
• positive;
• polite;
• pithy.

I know @aliteralgirl.

If I didn’t know @aliteralgirl, and I were browsing the Twitter public timeline trying to classify tweets for some shonky PR research assignment, and one of the categories available was ‘Babble’, I would probably class this tweet as ‘Babble’.

But I happen to know @aliteralgirl. And she knows me. We talk in real life once or twice a week, and the rest of the time we’re part of The Conversation on Twitter. So when I saw this tweet I read it as shorthand for something like this:

I’m eating avocado. It’s after 11, so I probably overslept and might be late for my teaching job. I’ll probably have to cycle like a demon to get there, but once I’m there nobody will really care that I was late and I’ll sit staring out of the window as usual. So for now I’m quite amused that I’ve made myself a slightly quirky breakfast, and I’m glad to be able to share it with a handful of people who might be reading Twitter at the moment.

Rather than just reporting my breakfast, which is acceptable but mediocre I’m adding a comment. Staking a claim. Not only am I eating avocado on toast, I’m telling you, the world, that it’s a great thing. Breakfast of champions. If you want to be a champion, you should really be eating this. If I were publishing this in a newspaper, or standing on a street corner shouting it, I would probably choose different words. Something more straightforward, maybe. ‘I love avocado on toast’ or ‘Eat avocado on toast’. But given that my boyfriend (who will definitely read this) and most of the other people who regularly spot my tweets generally have a certain quirky, British sense of humour, I’ve written it as a deadpan advertising slogan knowing full well that everyone will understand the spirit in which it was written. Except maybe the girl who’s watching the public timeline and classifying tweets. She’ll probably put it in the ‘Babble’ box.

You see, this tiny bit of babble is part of a huge conversation. My interpretation is only one of many, and the conversation carries over seamlessly into real life. You might even say that, in this case, the online part of the conversation is an extension of the real life part.

A justimanifestification for the Tweet Suite

I get a bit antsy and embarrassed when artists start to justify and explain their work, or produce manifestos, or make claims about the effects their work has on the world. But sometimes art does have a relevance beyond the aesthetic. Feel free to slap me round the face with a trout if I’m disappearing up my own arse, but I think the Tweet Suite has a message, albeit a simple one:

Babble is valuable in context.

In the context of a conversation, babble has value. With the Tweet Suite I’m setting babble to music, and that gives it context and therefore value. By making the avocado on toast tweet into an annoyingly catchy jingle, I’ve given it an unexpected life beyond its fleeting appearance on a handful of screens.

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Don’t get me wrong. I’m writing the Tweet Suite (50 movements in 90 days) because it’s fun, it’s something interesting to talk about, and I work better to a deadline. But whenever Twitter gets accused of being babble, I’m going to jump on a chair and give an impromptu performance of Movement 7 of the Tweet Suite. So if you see a 9-foot fop singing about avocado on toast, you’ll know what’s going on. And I’d appreciate it if you could join in with the harmonies at the end.

The 50/90 Challenge started a couple of days ago. The Challenge is to write 50 songs in 90 days.

I took part last year, and wrote loads of great songs (and a few silly ones). But the ones that really caught my imagination were the 12-second songs I wrote right at the end. So this year I’m writing short songs. Not 12 seconds, but definitely under a minute.

I’m going to find 50 brilliant tweets and set them to music. I’m calling it Tweet Suite:

Help me find the best tweets

So far I’ve found a few sites that claim to list the “best tweets”, but none of them have really delivered what I’m looking for. Maybe you can help. I’m not after funny tweets – setting them to music would be weird and horrible. I’m looking for the kind of tweets that make Twitter seem worthwhile. The tweets that inspire you. The tweets that restore your faith in humanity without being humourless. You know what I’m talking about.

You can submit tweets (or tweeters) to me in a few different ways:

• Tag them 5090tweetsuite on Delicious.
• Retweet and tag them 5090tweetsuite on Twitter.
• Send me a link on Twitter, email or Facebook
• Post a comment on this article.

I’ll put up a page with the candidates and the songs as I write them once I’m a couple of weeks into the challenge. Wish me luck, and keep your eyes open for brilliant tweets…