My Dad’s better than me at social media
It sunk in that my dad was better than me at social media this morning after he liked my most recent tweet. The tweet was a stock photo of egg and chips with the caption “some egg and chips to go with the gammon on my feed today”. (In case anyone didn’t know, although I now suspect people probably do know a lot more than I give them credit for, gammon is slang for middle aged ignorant white man.) My tweet was in reference to Saturday’s anti-BLM protests in London and all the subsequent videos I saw of sunburnt shaved heads punching their fists in the air.
So when my dad helped my tweet reach it’s tenth like my first thought was: wow I’m surprised he got the joke! — I’d asked our family members what the word gammon meant two years ago during our Christmas quiz and I don’t think he knew the answer then.
“I see you liked my tweet,” I said to him this morning, surprised that he a) remembered what a gammon was and b) found it funny.
“Well I thought it could do with some help.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You should be careful about being too anti gammon though!” Then he laughed.
So he does know what a gammon is, and he thought my tweet had a pitiful amount of likes so decided to be charitable. Thanks dad.
In the last two years my 67 year old father has become really good at twitter. He discovered a trick that I had no idea about, you can put a hashtag in your bio and your followers will multiply. The hashtag he used was #FBPE which stands for: Follow Back Pro European Union. It’s in line with his anti-Brexit views and helped him to build up a considerable mutual following of what I can only imagine are like minded individuals. He now follows 13.3K people and 13.6K follow him.
He shares with me various insights about twitter. The women who follow him with flirtatious bios and probably an onlyfans: “I decided not to follow her back!” He said like a blushing schoolboy who’d just discovered that grownups have sex. He once said: “Maybe if I made my profile picture a young attractive woman I’ll get more followers!” Don’t worry I think he was joking.
Sometimes he tells me with wonder that the last person who followed him was from America: “I’m corresponding with Americans now it’s amazing really.” I would nod, feeling that I myself was hardened to the ways of social media and not particularly amazed but would let him enjoy himself.
So now I’m starting to think that I’ve been patronising him. It’s not my fault. I find it really hard to gauge what he knows and doesn’t know. He’s aware of Taylor Swift and how many followers she has on twitter apparently but when I asked him if he’d heard of Stormzy yesterday, who’s been trending for donating half his worth to Black British causes, he said: “Yes the graffiti artist!”
Not long ago, like many parents, Facebook was my dad’s sole arena. This was back in 2016. But, as I diagnosed it, he was experiencing growing pains. Brexit had compelled him to dedicate hours to Facebook because he thought he could sway the minds of the odd individual he spotted commenting “Brexit means Brexit” on group pages. “This idiot” He would laugh, “must be feeling pretty silly now!” after he delivered them, what he considered, a damning comeback that they couldn’t argue with. Then he would gawp when they invariably did, endlessly.
Shortly after the Brexit vote I realised he hadn’t heard about algorithms. During the Trump campaign he sniggered: “Trump must hate Facebook! Because there are so many jokes about him on here!” I felt it my duty then to explain that his timeline may not look the same as everyone else’s. It was then that I encouraged him to join Twitter hoping it might broaden his bubble (I’m not claiming to be the best at advice).
Twitter didn’t necessarily broaden his bubble but it did work out well for him. I’m checking out his profile now: he has a pinned tweet with a thousand likes, I wondered what it felt like to watch your likes zoom to that number. It had happened to a couple of my friends, and now my dad.
While I wonder what my personal brand is and worry that if I get too political it might harm my job prospects my dad’s agenda has never wavered. He tweets and retweets with a sense of purpose, he has never once workshopped his drafts with me and I don’t think he does it on a WhatsApp groupchat with his friends either, but then perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised if I found out he did.