{"id":1258,"date":"2013-02-13T18:03:08","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T07:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/australiansforhonestpolitics.wordpress.com\/?p=1258"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:24:22","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:24:22","slug":"i-am-geekrulz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/i-am-geekrulz\/","title":{"rendered":"I am @geeksrulz"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Geek<\/p><\/div>\n

This is a big moment for me, saying who I am. I have personal, family and business reasons for being anonymous on Twitter.<\/p>\n

The last piece like this one I wrote 10 years ago on Margo Kingston\u2019s pioneering Webdiary.<\/p>\n

Does it matter who The Geek is?\u00a0 From the moment I set up a site with Margo Kingston called \u201cAustralians for Honest Politics\u201d, I knew that to be a credible contributor I would have to be honest and transparent about the man behind The Geek.<\/p>\n

The Geek’s time is over, and the time for the smart, sophisticated and insightful guy behind him has arrived. This is part of my 2013 resolution. My inner Gough was telling me: It\u2019s time!<\/p>\n

How I use Twitter<\/b><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t you love it when people follow through with their New Year resolutions? You have to admire my courage for doing this. Okay maybe not just yet, but please hear me out. To get to this point, I had to fight my way through the party political trench warfare on Twitter. How many people do you know who have done this? How many have retained their sense of humour? I had to fight orcs, goblins, wargs, stone giants and trolls.<\/p>\n

I am making light of the infamous hash tag on twitter called auspol, where it seems a lot of nasty (mostly from the right) people gather. It was a deliberate decision of mine to go where the left meets the right at the coalface of political argument, to witness it in all its ugliness, pettiness, and hatred. Can you blame me for adopting a pseudonym?<\/p>\n

In the distant past, a time before Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, these groups would never meet directly. Now they are directly exposed to each other in public.<\/p>\n

It can be fun to go where the tectonic plates of Australian politics clash and observe the resulting fireworks. It certainly can be more entertaining than the reheated, predictable, jaded, cynical and repetitive groupthink narrative dished up every day by our professional media communicators.<\/p>\n

\"kOmGEE5\"<\/p>\n

What I found in my travels through Twitter Mordor is that reason and logic will only get you so far. To discuss politics and to keep your sanity on Twitter you have to use humour, parody and satire, especially in an era of Post Truth Politics and Post Facts Media.<\/p>\n

A thing is funny when it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. –\u00a0<\/i>George Orwell<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus George Orwell explains what destroying the joint means. I like to challenge basic assumptions and premises put on Twitter which invariably reflect the media-fed or party-fed narrative of the day. You can quickly establish with a few questions who is a shallow tweeter and who has substance and beliefs.<\/p>\n

My first ever Tweet:<\/p>\n

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My fourth Tweet – Finding my voice:<\/p>\n

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My sixth and seventh Tweet – Finding my calling:<\/p>\n

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There are many ways to engage politically. You can write a blog, you can write a letter, you can tweet a journo, and you can ring call-back radio. In the end it doesn\u2019t matter as long as you engage with the issues that are important to you. I sometimes choose to engage with LNP staffers\/members and Menzies House trolls on Twitter because I like to get my hands dirty. I prefer the salt of the earth kind of way rather than a high brow academic approach to politics, which in my view is ineffective in the Post Truth era.<\/p>\n

Here is an illustration of the approach I prefer. Cut down a David Speers Sky News video interview from 13.30 minutes to 35 seconds to communicate at a visceral level with the viewer who gets the context of the Carbon Tax scare campaign.<\/p>\n