THE inside story of the creation of the world’s most disruptive social-media platform was told by the people who were part of it from the beginning, in Twitter: Breaking the bird (BBC2, 31 March). Twitter was co-founded in 2005 by the tech entrepreneurs Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Williams, and its initial premise was simple: to communicate succinctly what you were doing, in real time.
To encourage people to embrace the constraints of the platform, a limit was set of 140 characters, because, Mr Dorsey said, “making the canvas very small means that everything you put on it is a masterpiece.” How’s that highfalutin’ aim going? (I ask rhetorically, having once seen someone live-tweeting their visit to a public convenience.)
The utopian goal of the democratisation of communication and the principle of giving everyone a voice are not an untrammelled good, as “everyone” also meant stalkers and abusers. From the moment when it first went live, the rights to free speech and to be free from harassment have been in tension with each other.
This is a fascinating story, told with refreshing frankness, although notable for the absence of the ever-elusive Mr Dorsey. I doubt the creators of Twitter had any notion of the powerful beast that they were unleashing back in 2005. Today, their belief that good speech would outweigh bad speech seems naïve: when you give everyone with the ability to communicate equally, not everyone will reflect your values.
Last One Laughing UK (Amazon Prime, released 20 March and on demand) is a game featuring ten British comedians, with one rule: Don’t laugh. The comedians gather in a funhouse-resembling studio, monitored on TV screens by a ringmaster, Jimmy Carr, with support from Roisin Conaty. Most of the familiar names from UK comedy are included, such as Rob Beckett, Judi Love, Sara Pascoe, Joe Lycett, Bob Mortimer, and the ultra deadpan Richard Ayoade, who enters the game with supreme confidence, claiming not to have laughed since the 1990s. If you laugh, you get a yellow card; twice, and it’s a red card, and you’re out. The last player remaining is the winner. I decided to play along, too.
Full disclosure: I once got sent home from a school concert and was banned from the choir for corpsing in the middle of “What a friend we have in Jesus”, but the slightly stilted, awkward start to this programme made me feel lucky. Carr declared confidently: “If this ten can’t make you laugh, you’re dead inside.” I was just resigning myself to being internally deaded, when Mortimer pulled out a slide whistle, promising that, when it was deployed at the right moment, the consequences could be devastating. Reader, I laughed. I defy you not to laugh, too.
