TWIDDLe
‘She’s so old she’s still using email,’ she said.
She was about fourteen and trying to make a fashion statement out of a Catholic school uniform by rolling up the skirt to somewhere around her breakfast. She had something sticking out of her ear. It was either a stereo system or a cappuccino machine. I would have needed a magnifying glass to be certain. Her friend had something sticking out of her ears too. She wasn’t listening to breakfast skirt. She was talking into a bump in a piece of string that hung from her neck. Observation point, one here is that they weren’t communicating with each other. The importance of this wouldn’t hit me until several months later when we got back to Thailand.
I was in the local newsagents at the time looking at the front page of the biggest selling paper in England. There were tits on the cover – big ones. They didn’t seem to have any relevance to the lead story. The editor had taken a huge risk of losing low-concentration readers by putting in a three-word headline with punctuation; UP YOURS, FRANZ. I got the feeling that most readers wouldn’t make it past UP YOURS. Britain’s top seller is ninety percent pictures. The longest article – once you took the naughty photos out – was two inches long and the print was BIG. I wondered whether anyone would notice if they left the text out.
I pondered both the email comment and the broadsheet revolution on my way home. It occurred to me that it’s the cool guy, the one who sits back and observes the trends who ends up with a private jet and en-suite plastic surgery. But you have to be first.
Ten years ago, a friend and I sat in a bar one night and came up with this idea for a hand-held electronic device that would allow you to read books on a screen. We drew up plans for it until the bar shut. Neither of us could sleep as we visualized all the money we’d make out of it. We were ten years too late. So you need to be that cool, observer type AND quick. And the internet is definitely the way to go. I have something at home which explains all the intricacies of the internet in clear, almost remedial terminology. It’s called a wife. Jess gave me a quick rundown of the rapid evolution of on-line communication. While I was still learning which button to press for my email not to vanish into thin air, the modern world was already leaping and bounding ahead of me.
Cool guy sits back and examines the trend. We go from hand written letters that take a week to arrive – to email which is instantaneous but still bulky. People seem to think they can write as much as they like because there’s no end to the page. But, to its credit, email did introduce cute abbreviations like NIGYYSOAB (Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch) all of which took longer to find and peck than writing the actual words – and emoticons which did away with the need to make words altogether. But, excuse me, it was still all so then, and it had the word ‘mail’ in it. SYICP (So yesterday I could puke). Blogs arrived and survived only in the cobwebbed cyberspace of the over forties because, look out, here comes chatting. Chatting had a brief (three week) popular spell, but then social networking was on us. And, whoa, now we’re really getting down to the nitty-gritty. It’s all about ME. Come one and all, normal and weird and enter my most intimate space. But after a while it started to get a little disconcerting to know that a drooling postal worker with a criminal record in Gdansk knew what brand of moisturizer you had beside your bed. Sharing was icky. But at least there was a new ‘not exactly sharing’ instant communication fast food on the block; Twitter. As much depth and meaning as you can squeeze into a hundred and forty letters. If only published fiction were that bite-sized everyone would be reading. And here we arrived at a trend I knew I’d be able to milk. Fewer and fewer words. Sentences and grammar optional. All about self. No need to reply. No need to reply to reply. Basically, although putting up a brave social front, people didn’t want to communicate at all. They just wanted to be left alone and not troubled by annoying distractions like nuances and opinions. They wanted to do all their chatting and social networking with the person they loved the most. Which is when I came up with TWIDDLe: the unsocial network for people who have lost the ability to process words.
It all started in 2009 with a single operator (me) in an old garage at the back of my dad’s place. Fast forward a year and Forbes has us down as one of the IT companies to watch for 2011. Here at TWIDDLe HQ we’ve put together a package which will make you the only person in your universe. And as we’re only just embarking along this lonely road together, I’m offering membership to readers of ICWRC (You don’t have to work that one out. It’s at the top of the page) at the reduced rate of $150 a week. Forget Paypal. Just put it in a brown paper bag and mail it to me here. In fact, know what I’ll do? The first fifty readers – assuming you can struggle to the end of this blob – get signed in to TWIDDLe absolutely free. Yup. You heard it here, folks. Here’s what you do. Once I send you your personal IDRMA (It doesn’t really mean anything) code number, highlight all your networks and chat sites and communications over the past year. Somewhere on the right (that’s the side your mouse is on) of your keyboard is a button called ‘delete’. If you’re lucky it’ll just say DEL. Press that and you’ll notice that everything’s gone apart from solitaire and the recycle bin. You’re alone now. Unplug the computer, draw the curtains, get yourself a drink, and play with yourself.
Welcome to TWIDDLe.





