For Twitter drinkers
Go get a beer and then please do the following:
- think about where the beer came from. What do you know of the brewery, its history, the people behind the process?
- think not about aroma and flavour in comparative terms but how they meld together. Staccato? Segue?
- think about viscosity, carbonation, how the beer feels from your gums down to your throat. What do you feel? How does that feeling change as you continue to drink?
- think about the people you're drinking with (or not), the place where you're drinking, the time, the day, your mood, the weather and how all of these things affect your feelings towards the beer.
And then keep those thoughts to yourself for a while.
Try silent counsel for a change. Leave your smartphone alone. Enjoy the moment.
Reflect. Then Tweet.
Let's improve the signal-to-noise ratio for beer on Twitter.
1 - Yes, I've already started toning the down the volume of my random "I'm drinking this" tweets.
2 - the picture at the top of the article is from an excellent blog by Brian James Kirk, tech journalist and designer, who's well worth a read if you're even tangentially linked to hack writing in any way.
Talk about a sinner repented. Or a pot calling a kettle black. How about reflecting on the millions of posts about what you are going to drink?
ReplyDeleteFABPOW.
Repented indeed.
ReplyDeleteWhat's done is done. From now on, I'm only going to tweet beers if I honestly think anyone cares about what I have to say. Availability and quality are good things to tweet about; endless photos of bottles and pumpclips less so.
No. Twitter is for babbling shite, everyone knows that!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Rabid Barfly. Twitter is mostly for shite. What I am beginning to object to is over-blogging (posting blogs for the sake of it?), name-dropping in blogging (hassling breweries for free beer?), bloggers calling their blogs "writing" or "work" (It's a hobby, nothing more, but hobby is a dated dirty word). OK for some it is work but the published writers call their blogs blogs. A ten minute vlog on one bottle of beer on youtube? No thanks. Tweets about what's on where I like reading. If that includes a pic then it makes it more interesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for babbling shite, but I'm tiring of the "OMGWTF this beer is AWESOME!!!!!" tweets as much as I'm bored by "please read my over-long analysis of this beer here on my blog".
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, hand in the air - I've been guilty of both in the past. Can you see the confessional theme developing in these posts?
BeerBore - good observations. I'm minded to say writing is writing, wherever you find it, but some are desperate to add a veneer of respectability to their work by calling it anything but a blog. 'Blog' seems to have become a dirty amateurs word. Not sure why.
Over-blogging is an interesting one. Is that the knee-jerk "must-comment on everything" syndrome or the "I've got lots of free beer that I ought to write about" scenario?
Name-dropping for free beer is a tough one. It's the reason why some blogs exist; as long as they're transparent about it, fair enough. I always namecheck a brewery or supplier if I blog about a beer they gave me for free. But I don't exist solely to market beers. Others do. Like all review sights, some have opinions worth noting and others are poorly-constructed fanboy twaddle.