Saving Twitter from twits
The Dairy UK and AHDB Dairy social media campaign has caught my attention, along with a lot of millennials, it seems. The Department of Dairy-Related Scrumptious Affairs has been popping up all over the UK, from reusable coffee cups and bumper stickers, to departure boards at major railway stations. The addition of social media platforms such as Twitter has only spread the humorous campaign further
Like the Cheddarvision, the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers webcam from what seems like another lifetime ago, it has started to catch the interest of people far and wide – and not just sought-after millennials.
I think this is a very good use of this type of social media, rather than the continuing spewing of bile and vitriol from certain public figures. In a way, it is what the medium was supposed to be about, before the trolls and the anti-social types took it over and made it into a platform for the alt-right. Remember when there were kitten GIFs and puppy memes?
Sometimes I think it’s just an age thing, and as the medium gets older it will calm down a bit and behave with a bit more restraint. That being said, when politicians behave so badly with rants and are not censored for it but instead get more retweets and likes, what hope is there for Twitter? Normal people turn off from the outlet. Some people, like me, even read the newspaper for information now, rather than having it shouted at me in a 280-character limit. A sit-down with a physical paper gives me more time to digest very strange news events, I find.
Again, it reminds me of the old chat rooms in the younger days of the internet. Conversations always descended into meanness and chaos. So, perhaps if we flood the platform with nice things like The Department of Dairy-Related Scrumptious Affairs, we can reclaim the good side of interconnectivity, Twitter and the web. It’s worth a try.
