As many of you will know, I’m an avid user of Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook. I think both are wonderful places to share thoughts on gardening, engage with the online gardening community, learn from each other, and of course, to gently promote this garden and nursery from time to time. You didn’t notice? As if… :-)

Naturally then, I sat up and noticed when, in this month’s Gardener’s World magazine, Monty Don wrote about social media and gardening. He makes a number of points, but I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him to say that the tone was generally negative about the point and purpose of social media for gardeners. He pointed out that statistically, gardeners don’t use social media and this he linked to the fact that most gardeners are older than the internet-savvy generation.

So, let’s explore this and see where we end up. I shall lay my cards on the table. I have been blogging about gardening for 8 years – here’s a link to my very first blog post in January 2005. I was an active participant of the now closed GW Message Board for several years and found for the first time a large and generous online community of gardeners happy to share their expertise. I don’t know for sure how old many of them were, but it seemed to me that most were over 40, based on their years of gardening experience. Many were clearly retired – both keen gardeners and active social website users, note.

I resisted the lure of Twitter for a couple of years, then tried it again, drawn by the presence of former Message Board members such as the highly entertaining Arabella Sock and people whose writing I enjoyed like James Alexander Sinclair. Fast forward 3 years and now I tweet pretty much every day – sometimes about plants and gardening but often about other issues I care about, such as the environment or social issues. If you’ve something to say to the wider world, there is no better place to do it, but take note, it is a merciless meritocracy – the Twitterati will simply ignore you if you have nothing interesting to say, or tell you to your virtual face if you talk nonsense.

Monty joined Twitter about two years ago, as I recall. He was plainly reluctant at first but found his feet when he realised he could use the medium to get the message out for environmental causes he cares about. I can’t remember the subject but I do recall the ‘I get it now’ tweet which ensued. I was about the 30th person he followed, probably because I am a known entity – we have met and chatted a few times at RHS shows. Obviously I was pleased, and for a while I tweeted somewhat self-consciously – when someone you greatly admire follows you and who follows relatively few others, you know your tweets will pop up in their timeline and stay there for a bit. I soon got over it. It’s surprisingly easy to ‘read’ someone’s persona on Twitter, and very difficult to fake one.


So, what does Twitter feel like? Fifty years ago, we saw our neighbours, cousins and in-laws almost every day when we walked to the shops or got the bus to work. Now, we drive to work, or work from home and many people are socially isolated. 


Twitter offers something of that community spirit back again. You are sceptical? Ask Ronnie, aka @Hurtledto60, getting messages of support every day from fellow gardeners and others as she deals with her cancer treatment. Ask @DigitalNun – a real nun in a real convent who shares her life, her prayers and her observations about life with her followers and chats about her world with anyone of faith or none. Ask @BenjaminRanyard – his amusing tweets about his seeds and flowers brighten the lives of his 18,000 horticultural followers. Logging onto Twitter over breakfast is genuinely like walking down a real street every morning, chatting with the neighbours and having a peek in the shopkeepers’ windows to see what they’ve got in.

But like all communities, Twitter is no utopia. There are disputes, internicine battles, rowdy arguments in the street, people I have nothing in common with and some that I try to avoid. And as in ‘real’ life, the better known you are, the more flak you attract. Monty gets his fair share of fruitcake tweeters – like the guy who wanted to turn up at one of his talks and give him a 5 minute lecture on lawns. Mostly people tell him how much they love his books. A few criticise something he’s done on Gardener’s World, or cheekily ask for an RT of their pet project or to make their Mum’s day. But that’s about as heavy as it gets. If you want to see what proper online abuse is like, try following the woman who is campaigning to get Page 3 abolished in the Sun.

Monty says in his article ‘..although most of us use computers, I suspect we do so with a sense of wonder that our children and grandchildren do not feel.’ Hmmm. I am 52. I first used a mainframe computer terminal at British Airways aged 19. I was one of the first there to use the new PCs, aged about 24, so I’ve been using a computer of some sort for over 30 years. I am entirely comfortable in the digital world. I regularly give talks, which I create in Powerpoint and set the laptop, projector and remote mouse up in seconds. I think nothing at all of this. I note from Monty’s tweets that he often struggles with technology. He is 57 or 58, I think. Maybe that five or six years makes a difference. 

When I meet someone my age who tells me they don’t use a computer much or that they share their spouse’s email address I am genuinely astonished. I wonder how they cope at work and I know that communicating with them will require active endeavour on my part, involving envelopes, stamps and trips to post offices, or taking phone calls when perhaps it’s not a good time. I like the fact that incoming work emails can be left until I decide to have an ‘admin hour’ and then dealt with efficiently, diary and cup of tea to hand. You think this is the mindset of the under thirties? Add at least twenty years.

Perhaps that five years makes a difference in social expectations too. Monty says that the over-familiarity of social media throws him and that using the same website does not make us friends. Well, of course not. When we go to a supermarket and the checkout assistant chats about the weather, we do not presume we are being befriended. We have learned to read the communication conventions of the real world and, like all social scenarios, the communication conventions of the online world need to be learned too. Here, I think is where Monty shows his – well, I was going to say ‘age’, but I sense I’m trying to let him off an awkward hook, and in doing so, am guilty myself of a form of ageism. I’ve come across plenty of much older people who have quickly figured it out, like 95 year old @QuiltingMuriel for example. It’s not a question of age so much as a question of – what? His words suggest something like high-mindedness. 

To me the most disconcerting line in the article is when he says that ‘Friendships are built, not bought’. No money changes hands on Twitter so what can he mean? ‘Bought’ in the form of online flattery or being lured into a unwitting 140 character reply? I really don’t know what he’s driving at. Anyway, the implication seems to be that responding to someone might lead them to think of him as a friend. A friend! How very dare they….

I don’t see such a clear gulf between people in the real and digital worlds. Social media offers me additional ways of staying in touch with ‘real world’ friends – it’s so easy just to say hi when someone you already know posts something interesting online. And of course it’s a great way to develop new acquaintances, share knowledge, find people to give your surplus apples too, to lend a hand with show gardening, bake cakes for charity day and yes, sometimes to become face-to-face friends. Real friends, if you like. Friends I want to meet and break bread with, share a bottle of wine with and then say hello to later when they post something interesting online. And so the real and digital worlds collide, beautifully.

Mostly, I think Monty’s article was a missed opportunity. The article could have welcomed gardeners to join the active and engaged community of gardeners on Twitter. He could have explained why he continues to use Twitter, despite himself, which seems to me to be to share his personal passions alongside his observations about the beauty of gardens and the pleasures of gardening. Instead we got dark mutterings of ‘grave reservations’ about social media and complaints about being ‘hectored… loudly and rudely.. about something I do for love’.

Oh, Monty. Someone should have had a quiet word before it went to print and offered you a rethink. Really, in the social media age what were you and the magazine’s editors thinking? You may garden for love, but you are also paid to do it by licence payers. If viewers want to tell you what they think, are they supposed to write to Feedback, in pen and ink, leaving you to tweet in peace about the vanishing swallows?

Anyone can engage with, enjoy and exploit the power of social media. But it really doesn’t do to tell people how they may or may not reply or how to feel about what we post, whether that is unwanted adoration, bitter criticism or – what most social media users dread more than anything – no response whatsoever.


PS – sorry if you can’t see or post comments – seems to be something to do with Chrome. Try a different browser if you can, or click CTRL and refresh. I am trying to fix it but there are clearly limits to my IT literacy!

x

October 26, 2013