Cornell Finch

Twitter’s Most Boring Man

My good friend Pam sent me a link to a (local) news story the other day. Unfortunately I have only just remembered the link to be able to write about it.

Newsbiscuit reports that “Twitter has just banned Britain’s dullest man”

Paul Atkins, a resident of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, yesterday became the first person to be banned from the social networking site ‘Twitter’ for being far too dull.

Yes, his tweets really were “dull”. For example “Chicken breasts on 2 for one at Co-Op” or “I can see a ferry”. Certainly not the most interesting tweets ever. Some even rival the banality of my own twitter posts.

At first his posts gained a cult following as word spread amongst other keen Twitter users that this might be the most boring man in the UK, but the novelty soon wore off. At his height Mr Atkins was posting so frequently that the Isle of Wight’s mobile phone network was slowing noticeably, and the Twitter data centre was adding storage capacity at an alarming rate just to keep up. As users began to complain that just viewing his daily log of banal non-events was eating up most of their monthly broadband allowance, the service finally pulled the plug on his account.

Somehow I very much doubt that Twitter was having to upgrade just to keep up with Mr Atkins. More likely to keep up with the followers of Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Stephen Fry and other celebrities. As for the users complaining about their monthly broadband allowance, never heard of the “unfollow” button?

A spokesman for Twitter said, ‘When Stephen Fry gets stuck in a lift and posts a picture we get 50,000 clicks and national news coverage. But 20 posts an hour with video from a 65-year-old nonentity with his arm stuck round the U-bend of the toilet? No business model can sustain that.’

When Stephen Fry gets stuck in a lift, is that really newsworthy? No. It’s just another indication of the shallowness of the race that we need to cling on to celebrity and know their every move. I will admit at this point that I do follow Mr Fry, however I could quite happily ignore most of his banal tweeterings too. Yet, because he is celebrity he has status and will not be banned. I was always under the impression that Twitter was created for the “non-entity”, not the celebrity. Now, Mr Atkins tweets may have been shit[1. see what I did there? Eh? Eh? Never mind.] and 20 an hour is more than a little excessive, but banning him for being boring? A little far methinks.

If you want someone interesting to follow, try Mr Kryten himself, Robert Llewellyn. @bobbyllew generally tweets and converses with his audience. Ok, many of his posts are about “Car Pool” on You Tube and iTunes, but at least they are interesting!!