SIDELINE CUT:Media uncertainty on how to deal with Twitter turned it into a monster as throwaway musing have become serious stories. It you don't want to be a twit, be careful what you say

IT’S ALL the name. Ruby Walsh always says that the first problem racing authorities face when it comes to dealing with whip controversies is the given name itself. The Whip. The jockey whipped the horse. The horse found nothing on the run-in despite McCoy’s repeated urging with the whip. It just sounds so harsh, so brutal, so unutterably cruel.

Thing is, what jockeys use isn’t a whip, it’s a pad on the end of a flexible stick. Now, that might sound like little more than semantics to you but words matter always. If the name of the implement was The Pad, the whole issue would be seen in a different light. The jockey padded the horse. The horse found nothing on the run-in despite McCoy’s repeated urging with the pad.

It only sounds odd because you’re used to hearing it the other way. But the physical effect of a nine-stone man hitting a one-ton horse would remain the same and we might be able to take a little of the emotion out of the debate along the way.

So it goes with Twitter. The first obstacle to any bit of reasoned chat about Twitter is always the name. People who don’t get it and don’t want to get it reach for the word with a sneer on their lip. How could you take seriously a phenomenon with such a silly name? I had a friend’s father ask me with jocular disdain in the pub one night, “Are you on this oul’ Twitter or Twatter, or whatever you want to call it?”

Now, this is a man of the world. No fuddy-duddy he. Mid- to late-50s, just retired, rides motorbikes around the world for fun. He isn’t a technophobe, he isn’t a Luddite. But Twitter? Twatter more like.

Twitter is a headline writer’s bonanza too. A loose word here, an injudiciously shaken fist there and straight away, you’re a Twit. Rory McIlroy and Jay Townsend were called Twits by all and sundry last week, obscuring what was a decent row on an issue of substance.

Is there a better put-down? Call somebody a Twit and you’re basically saying their judgment is shot and their opinion is worthless. And by taking the name of the website and turning it around to make it an insult, the battle lines get drawn and meaningful conversation about it is shut down.

It’s a decent bet that we’d all be closer to feeling comfortable with it by now if it had been called something staid and dull like MyDiary or Bubble or Fridgenote. (Naming internet phenomena is the easiest thing in the world. It’s basically living space bingo. Look up from your paper right now and pick the first object that catches your eye that has 10 letters or fewer in it. Bam! You’re a heartbeat away from being Mark Zuckerberg.)

But what serious people miss about Twitter is it was never meant to be taken seriously in the first place. The reason we know this is the first ever tweet, posted by Jack Dorsey on March 21st, 2006, read: ‘just setting up my twttr’. Dorsey is a 34-year-old who’s just about to make his first half-billion so there’s no way you couldn’t call him a serious person.

But he created Twitter to tap into a generation that cares a lot less about punctuation and vowels than it does about tossing its thoughts out into the world pell-mell and higgledy-piggledy.

It was never meant as anything more than young people screaming down a well and cocking an ear to catch their voices echoing back at them. It’s just thinking out loud, daydreams and thought bubbles committed to posterity. And if the only people who’d cottoned on to it were teenagers and students ruminating over whether to have pizza or pasta for dinner, it would have popped and dispersed long ago, scattered to the winds like so much web detritus.

But Twitter took its foothold when the serious people got involved. When celebrities started using it to take back some of their lives from bloggers and paparazzi. When journalists started using it to source stories. When rather than being treated as powder-puff trivialities, tweets started to assume the significance of life choices chiselled in tablets of stone.

Bit by little bit, the fun of Twitter got chipped away and eventually we ended up with poor MJ Tierney filling a couple of news cycles for a one-word tweet on the way home from a match.

The toothpaste is out of the tube now. Aussie swimmer Geoff Huegill wrote a column from the World Swimming Championships last week calling Twitter a monster. “Forget drugs in sport and even match-fixing,” he wrote in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, “social media has the potential to ruin an athlete’s career and tarnish a country’s reputation.”

Huegill is a 32-year-old heading for his third Olympics and is a reasonably enthusiastic tweeter himself so these aren’t the words of an above-the-fray type dismissing silly little Twitter. It’s a genuine concern now that any sportsperson can have their focus derailed by a media tornado whipped up thanks to a few offhand taps on an iPhone.

Because make no mistake, it’s the traditional media’s uncertainty on how to deal with Twitter that has turned it into the monster of Huegill’s column.

As with most new, new things, we were slow to catch on in the first place and then we piled in like drunks at a late bar with the shutter half-down. Twitter became a place you could be first with the news, especially if your paper was already gone to press anyway. In a game of rock, paper, scissors, Twitter beats TV and radio news nine times out of 10.

It’s what led to the sad and hugely unfortunate circumstance early on Thursday morning of one prominent GAA journalist apparently confirming the rumour swirling overnight that Ger Loughnane had died. He wasn’t the first to post it – there were pages of tributes on message boards already before he did – but because of what he does for a living and the assumption he wouldn’t have said it without a proper source, his post automatically carried weight. It spread like wildfire and some of the internet news sites ran with it. A local radio station in the midlands did the same. For around three hours, it was taken as fact.

Thankfully, his source was wrong and Loughnane is fine. Getting better, if anything. By mid-morning the journalist was apologising for jumping the gun.

But the black smoke that rises from a post like that gets everywhere and is impossible to fully take back. Throughout Thursday, Twitter was alive with questions about Loughnane’s health and criticism of those who spread the news. By the end of the day, people were breezily declaring the whole thing a hoax. As if someone had deliberately set out make mischief with the great man’s illness. As if people were that evil, that short on humanity.

This is what can happen when you take Twitter too seriously. Right now, teams and managers and players the world over in all sports are trying to figure out a way to avoid digging themselves into holes because of it. But there’s a straightforward way through it. Words matter always, so stick to making them about things that couldn’t matter less.