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Have you signed up to the royal wedding account @RoyalWedding on twitter to follow the countdown to the William and Kate’s big day? With only a week to go to the big day, only 12,000 people are following this twitter account, so we’re not exactly in the Charlie Sheen or Justin Beiber twitter territory for popularity.
However, until I heard about it this morning on ‘Click’ the BBC’s weekly technology programme I wasn’t aware of its existence. I may be a bit old fashioned, but I rather cringed when the presenter Spencer Kelly said that tweets would be going out all through the day keeping people up to date with every moment of the royal wedding.
Having a rather vivid imagination I immediately imagined the newly married couple tweeting as they walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey. Wouldn’t that be hilarious. Okay, it’s a bit fanciful, but the whole idea did make me smile. Now call me old fashioned but frankly what I can’t see on television about the royal wedding, I really don’t need to know about.
Do I really need to know the exact moment when the bridesmaids get dressed, what they had for breakfast, whether Kate is nervous and all the other perfectly useless details the followers of this account will receive. I’m not saying TV won’t tell viewers lots of useless facts – they will, but with only 140 characters it will take the banality of royal weddings to new levels.
With awful films, endless TV programmes about royalty and royal brides, inches of newspaper columns devoted to Kate, the dress, the fact that she’s not saying ‘obey’ during the vows, her weight loss and shopping trips to the Kings Road and the fact that her parents only recently met the Queen, we are already well into over-kill territory to the delight of the stalwart royalists. A big thing has been made of the royal wedding of Kate and Wills being different from previous ones in its modernity, so I guess it was inevitable twitter would also play a tiny part.
Now I like twitter and I use it myself. I’m not one of those po-faced people who says they only tweet when they have something interesting to say and will only give useful information! I am one of those people who talks about their pets which of course to lots of people is entirely irrelevant but I’ve found it useful to get tips from other dog owners around the world.
But I do, worry about how technology influences our day to days experience and the fact that every morsel of information needs to be shared instantly. In the case of wars, conflicts, disasters natural or man-made around the world, I can see that being able to keep the public up to date is very useful. However, I really question whether we need to be fed such a continuous diet of instant news and information . It seems as if many of us are happy to be provided with hours of completely banal information. I do wonder where it will all end.
As for the royal wedding – will I be following it on twitter. Not me. I’ll be glued to the television (with the sound turned down) to see the first glimpse of that dress!
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