Yesterday at 1.03PM, I tweeted for the 8,418th time.
(That’s since December 2009.)
Here’s the post.
As I write, this has had 354.1K views. 509 comments. 322 retweets. 5.1K likes.
Way beyond the response I’ve had to any other tweet.
Many of the comments have been —
That’s crochet!
A high proportion of the other comments, in response to the question ‘And the collective noun for knitted Vincent van Goghs is?’ are —
An earful.
It almost seems as if there’s a collective compulsion to respond that way, without checking the other responses.
Only a few minutes after I’d posted, the poet Sarah Doyle sent a reply —
Starry Knits
And I thought that was it. She’d won. Everyone would give up.
I felt a bit annoyed at myself for not having thought of that and originally posted ‘Is starry knits the collective noun for crocheted Vincent van Goghs?’
But others kept coming, faster and faster, among them —
A cornucopia
and
It’s the Gogh Team
and
WHERE CAN I BUY ONE PLEASE
A lot of desire out there for the cute Vincents.
By the evening, the tweet was getting ten likes every few seconds.
In a couple of weeks, I’m going to be teaching a class on writing for the internet. And as I’ve inadvertently written something that’s travelled very far very fast, I’d like to ask why?
When I posted, I thought this was a chance for people to be witty. Perhaps ten people.
But if I’d done that myself, by thinking up something with as much knit-wit as Sarah Doyle’s reply, and putting it in the original tweet, I don’t think there would have been any response.
That would just have been me showing off, rather than opening the door for people to enjoy typing, Earful, Ears and Auditorium.
By asking a question, in a flowing way, and saying, ‘Over to you…’ I was doing something which exactly fits the form of old-time Twitter. Since it’s become X, there’s a lot less of this kind of trivial banter — and maybe people enjoyed joining in with something a bit wholesome and pre-Musk.
Also, and I think this is even more crucial to the going-slightly-viral, if I’d known it was crochet rather than knitting, that tranche of respondents wouldn’t have had a reason to come to the party.
Being wrong prompts people to correct you. They can’t help themselves. Hence the genre of posting a photo of a well known actor and saying, ‘Who is this. Wrong answers only.’
However, most of these explanations are themselves wrong, or partial.
What I’ve completely missed out here, because I’m a writer, and thinking of the writing, is the photograph itself of the Vincents themselves.
Most important of all is that people see that particular image and have an immediate emotional response and part of that response is to want to share.
The viralness of the tweet is down less to my skills as a copywriter and more to whoever designed the Vincents, and whoever painstakingly made them (for how little?), and whoever put them on display in that little arch in the Courtauld Gallery shop.
I noticed them, thought them odd, took a shot from that angle.
And so it’s primarily as a photographer, not a writer, that I’m responsible for the viral Vincents.
Don’t get me wrong — the accompanying line needed to be right, but the image needed to be omg that’s so cute!
(The tweet has now had 371K views. 526 comments. 332 retweets. 5.4K likes.)
I read more than a handful of the other replies after seeing the post and I still replied "earful", because that's what I thought of first.