David Mitchell

This is the fourth time since I joined in 2011. One of those times was after I read a tweet which made me worry about getting caught in a terrorist attack. Another time was after watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix, a documentary about the abundant negatives of social media. This time, it’s in the spirit of boycotting an unethical business.

But the first time I quit was a little half-hearted and may have been largely to facilitate the writing of an amusing poem.

Bitter Twitter Quitter went like this:

So bitter from Twitter!

Littered with fits of chatter,

scattered with bits of mental matter that matter not a bit.

Sit and wait for wit to hit,

a neat tweet to tweet my need for someone to meet my need for

attention.

Twitter isn’t fit for twits like me

who work from home, sit alone

nurturing literary pretentions

while searching for Twitterary mentions,

hollower and hollower, counting our…

That was just the start. I did it at a poetry slam or two, then back around 2013 I think, the BBC Talkback radio show was covering World Poetry Day and an anniversary of Twitter in the same programme, and I rang in and read it out, probably sounding like a complete lunatic. But it was an irresistible coincidence at the time. Wendy Austin seemed to enjoy it.

Now I’m using LinkedIn and so far so good. It’s much less addictive, but still useful to hear about work-related stuff.

We don’t know what’s going to happen with ‘X’. It would be great if it wasted away, and it would be great if universities led the way to the exit (X-it! Another poem!), given their stated commitments to accuracy and decency. Shortly after the Guardian newspaper left, I contacted my own university and suggested they leave. They said they were keeping it under review.