Pete Wishart Bored During Roll-Call of the Dead

As I have discussed before, the immediacy of that human interaction replacement service, Twitter, can lead to impolitic remarks being emblazoned across the Internet. All the more reason to be especially careful about what one says, especially when one is a sitting MP.

SNP member for Perth and Perthshire North, Pete Wishart – who speaks Gaelic, so is more Scottish than Mike Russell – has been forgiven by his party, speaking on behalf of Scotland, for burbling away during the first Prime Minister’s Questions of 2009/10.

Fully-grown adults had been required to sit still for over two minutes as Gordon Brown read-out the names of those 37 servicemen who had been killed in Afghanistan over the summer recess. Amongst the dead was Acting Sergeant Michael Lockett (2nd Batallion, The Mercian Regiment). From Monifieth in Angus, Lockett was the first holder of the Military Cross to die in combat since the Second World War, and his funeral was taking place that day.

As activity returned to the chamber, Wishart rushed to his Echofon to tweet that:

No mention of the E word in PMQ’s.
4:35 AM Oct 14th from Echofon

Broon’s Alcy Ada’s back. Either an international terrorist organisation or a female Glaswegian drunk
4:23 AM Oct 14th from Echofon

Thought it would have been a more interesting PMQs first day back. Yawn..!
4:18 AM Oct 14th from Echofon

Disregarding the time-stamps, Wishart can be seen to have been listening closely enough to mock Brown’s enunciation, but maybe not thinking closely enough to think he should have waited a bit before tweeting.

Further to his gripe about the “E word”:

Everybodys to get a letter. This guy Legg seems like a real attention seeker and is stringing his moment of glory out as long as possible
10:32 AM Oct 12th from Echofon

Given the indecent complaining by individuals on salaries of at least £64,000 plus expenses, to see Wishart proceed to accuse openly a professional civil servant of glory-seeking jars even more. Especially as Wishart fails to reveal on Twitter that he has been asked to repay £1,600 for duplicate claims.

Stunning immaturity, as others have said.

The Collective Noun for Tweets

Although my views against Twitter, are not as strong as those of the legal eagle for the BNP, Lee John Barnes (LLB Hons), I have felt little desire to partake of this human interaction replacement service.

The word on the street remains that Twitter was used to great effect during the popular protests following the recent Iranian elections. From the beginning, I doubted this very much and assumed it had simply slipped by the attention of the still primitive Iranian state cyber-security; and that China would have counter measures in place.

Alternatively, as I recounted of a broadcast of Nightwaves, there may have been honey-traps in operation.

Also unlike Barnesey (LLB Hons), I do not channel any misanthropic rage against Twitter through the medium of blogging.

I quite enjoy blogging. In addition to also using Facebook, I have recently found Interpals, which I suspect is powered by the former. The principle difference between these two social ecological systems is that Facebook requires introduction before one is able to enter another’s virtual space, whilst Interpals user profiles are freely accessible (unless stipulated) and one can introduce oneself or simply stand outside looking in on other’s virtual spaces.

Both provide functions which the other does not, and neither are diminished for that. In some cases, I have progressed from individuals ‘met’ on Interpals to their sandbagged spaces on Facebook.

An observation on Twitter by George Seimens appeared on the blogstream for Efrafan Days:

I’m not very active on my Twitter account (maybe a few posts a day with many skipped days in between). I have found, though, that Twitter is far more about relationships than about content. Twitter is about conversations that vaporize rather quickly. When I access Twitter, I’m not too concerned about conversations that went on before (”before” defined as anything more than 5 minutes ago). I jump in to catch a bit of a stream, share a thought/link. A relationship does exist between time on Twitter and how productive I feel: more time, less productive. Twitter can help a person become aware of new technologies and information, but for depth of learning (reflection, thinking, writing – i.e. getting past “what it is” and moving to “what it means”) Twitter is limited.

In one of those “so I turned to her, and she turned to me, and I turned to her… and soon we were going around in circles” moments, Seimens refers to other blog missives and quotes from missives which they referred to; so I *think* I am getting this correct.