Don't press send: why restraint is a fine old virtue for a tweeting world

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/18/henry-porter-emails-twitter-restraint

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John Allen, the American general caught up in the Petraeus scandal, is said to have sent between 20,000 and 30,000 "potentially inappropriate" emails over a two-year period to a housewife named Jill Kelley. The general was averaging between 27-41 emails to Ms Kelley every day. Even if he composed his dispatches at a lick, taking no more than 30 seconds on each one, we can calculate that between 6.9 and 10.4 days of the general's four-star time was lost to Ms Kelley.

Whether the emails are inappropriate in the way that Congress leaders and the FBI suspect is really not the point. The volume of traffic is staggering for a man in a senior command who hoped to become supreme allied commander of Nato; it suggests obsession, looseness and maybe a lack of discipline, all characteristics encouraged by modern communications.

There is the quaint and almost universal conviction that emails are private and eventually decay of their own accord. That's why a Merrill Lynch president, Peter Melz, who was involved in a deal with allies at Goldman Sachs, felt able to write: "Fuck the compliance area procedures, schmecedures"; a candidate for governor of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker, engaged in ill-advised chumminess with the shamed Bob Diamond; a Google engineer wrote to his company's head of mobile, admitting that he had specific working knowledge of a patent owned by Oracle; and a Conservative councillor, in charge of traveller sites, sent an email with a mocked up sign which read "F* off gypos." This came back to embarrass him six years after he sent it.

Out there, millions of hostages to fortune wait to unlock police investigations, sink companies, blow up careers and marriages and, above all, to surprise the authors of these emails with the irrefutable evidence of their own folly. And even now, when we know that absolutely every flirtation, off-colour joke and indiscretion is digitally embalmed for ever, we go on spilling our brains, as if we were on the fifth port and lemon in the snug bar and no one was listening.

To watch Twitter over the past week has been fascinating, like seeing a child reprimanded for the first time. The whole point of Twitter is that it is an instantly gratifying public activity. It represents a thrilling liberation for revolutionaries and gossips alike, a miraculous noticeboard and exchange. Until last week, when Lord McAlpine's lawyers deployed a specialist firm to track down those who tweeted his name in connection with the disastrous Newsnight investigation, the Twitterati believed that either the aura of the micro-blogging site or safety in numbers – which are probably the same thing – would protect them from the man they casually, almost subconsciously, began to destroy. In Elias Canetti's words, they felt "the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim" and they did not give a damn.

The centre does not hold on Twitter. Despite the insistence that it is an arena for individualists, it is also a place of tribes, for those well adapted to the school playground – the followers and the followed. For Piggy, Ralph and Jack. Few, apart from political journalist Michael Crick – as far as I could tell – came to Lord McAlpine's defence. Few think of modifying or slapping down the tweeted suggestion that the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens should have had the decency to die of the cancer that killed his brother, Christopher, perhaps because Hitchens is a rightwing Christian who believes strongly in the family.

If Elias Canetti were alive today, he wouldn't be surprised by the daily formation of Twitter flash mobs or the heartlessness on show. It is remarkable how they conform to the observations about the life of the crowd in his great work, Crowds and Power, which is why it is worth paying attention to the way Twitter evolves and has an impact on society. At any rate, we may cautiously welcome the adjustment following Lord McAlpine's legal action: Sally Bercow will get a richly deserved comeuppance for drawing attention to the rumour, despite her sudden claim of victimhood, and others may think twice before tweeting a lie. This issue isn't about free speech, but truth.

Twitter is not alien or new to humanity. It is part of us and shaped by the extrovert side of human nature. Spend time in a room of strangers and it is easy to spot the tweeters, not simply because of the phone in their hands, but they are usually extroverts or have something to sell. A game for an idle moment is to choose natural tweeters from history. Dickens, yes; Austen, no; Sir Joseph Banks, yes; Darwin, no; John Wilkes, yes; Dr Johnson, no; Disraeli, yes Gladstone, no. Shelley, yes; Keats, no. You may disagree with my take, but you see the point: not every personality is naturally drawn to the marketplace.

The interesting part of this all is why email and Twitter consume such an enormous amount of time, truly one of the phenomena of this moment in human history. General Allen's staff report he gets through 200-300 emails every day and it's not unusual for people to spend two hours a day on Twitter. Clearly, email and Twitter are addictive and provide rewards in neural pathways we have little idea about. If not the waste of time, it is this compulsion that should make a man such as General Allen stay his hand and wonder if the email he's about to fire off could not be improved by delay or, better, forgotten.

The famous marshmallow experiment, conducted by Stanford professor of psychology Walter Mischel, drew some interesting conclusions about young children who had the ability to defer pleasure. The kids were placed in a room with a delicious looking marshmallow and told they could have two marshmallows if they did not ring a bell, but instead waited until the researcher returned. Most rang the bell and ate the marshmallow, but about 30 per cent delayed their gratification and got two. These proved to be the children most likely to succeed in life.

The power to delay gratification and put something out of your mind, which can apparently be taught, says a lot about your abilities in other areas – to grapple with difficult subjects, control hot emotions, make rational judgments and act prudently. But there is another reason to defer the pleasure of shooting from the hip in email and on Twitter. It is that you are more likely to moderate your opinion, think of others and maybe save your skin, advice I should certainly follow. Don't eat the marshmallow; wait before joining that crowd.

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