Hugh Keevins: Should I stay or should I go?

I joined social media as an experiment on Saturday, September 26, welling up and with my bottom lip ever so gently trembling at the thought of it all.

On Wednesday, September 30 in New York, five days and five thousand followers later, the tech website Recode reported that Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey had given his approval to the lifting of the 140 characters limit that users have for the purpose of sending of messages at the present time.

I took this to mean that Jack had been informed by concerned staff that a newcomer in Scotland had been subjected to such a torrent of abuse that he was in desperate need of extra room to manouvre his way out of trouble.

That's my imagined version of events and I'm sticking to it.

I spent a professional lifetime, forty five years in total, trying to craft sometimes lengthy pieces for the supposed entertainment of a newspaper-reading audience. Now I was being introduced to a world where the five thousand wanted the meaning of life explained to them in a few dozen letters, not paragraphs.

People, I was told by the whippersnapper generation whose lives are ruled by this malarkey, now want their information in bite-sized chunks and don't have time for subjugating verbs, hanging participles or any of that other literary nonsense.

The sub-text of what we grandly called my sociological experiment was also, I suspect, to see how far I could be pushed by the extremist wing of the Twitterati before I imploded and begged for my account to be cancelled on medical grounds.

It's true there are, as I've discovered, groups of people who seem to see their sole function as being to 'Reel in' the un-suspecting and make them wish they'd never wandered down certain alleyways.

They are not so much the Gangs of New York as the Gangs of Quick Talk.

I mistakenly thought I could bring maturity to that coarse environment but a week at the coal-face has told me that's a waste of time on a par with appealing to their better nature.

On the night Celtic played Fenerbahce in the Europa League I wished Scottish football's last participants in the competition all the best and received dog's abuse from those who supported another club.

When the game ended in a draw and I tweeted my opinion that Efe Ambrose was a bad defender and had proved as much against the Turks, the Celtic fans tweeted to say I had an agenda against the club and was lower than a snake's belly.

That's how the Twitterati roll.

But it would be remiss of me to mention the massive number of people whose welcome has been heart felt, affectionate and, for me, touching in the extreme.

I am light relief, it would appear, for those disillusioned with bitter Twitter, the area where those obsessed with long worn out arguments about Rangers' history, tax cases and the other forms of subject matter that have long since lost their newsworthy flavour stand defiantly howling at the moon.

And now I have learned that the most innocent of remarks can be siezed upon by the howlers like bread crumbs thrown to the pigeons in George Square, no matter the time of night or day that you make them.

In other words, it is a bit like teaching your kids not to go near the fire when they are very young. I am learning to avoid the places where first degree burns could be the consequence of not being careful.

And I have come to the conclusion that staying with this social phenomenon known as Twitter could be interesting, so long as I adapt myself to its strange ways.

There has to be moderation when it comes to how often you visit the Twitterati and a need to dis-abuse myself of the notion that everybody is interested in what I have to say on any given subject at any time of the night or day.

There has to be a greater sense of personal discipline when it comes to rising to the bait thrown by those who would have you sucked into an argument you can't win. See it coming and give it a bodyswerve will be my modus operandi from now on.

I put a space between the end of a sentence and an exclamation mark and someone tweeted that I was, and I quote, a "Senile old fossil" for doing such a thing, but we'll move on.

I'm still not one hundred per cent sure what purpose Twitter serves, especially when I've just been sent a photograph of someone's genitalia, but I'll persevere for a while longer to see if I can get to the bottom of that particular mystery.

The kindly element have said I've made Twitter more interesting and they want me to stay where I am at least until the next time Celtic play Rangers. Then, I am told, I will find out what Twitter is really all about. I think I can guess the rest.

So, the verdict is I will hang around. If there have been mistakes over the course of my introductory week then I made a lot of them myself. I won't repeat them and I won't dwell on them

Using 140 characters, I'll finish by saying, "It's been emotional. Let's do it again."

And if you're reading this New York, Mister Dorsey, hurry up and formalise the lifting of that 140 character limit. i need to talk my way out of some tight situations here.