Tweeting For Tradition

The Herdy Shepherd isn’t your typical social media star: 

Our shepherding work in the English Lake District is all about continuity and being part of a living cultural tradition that stretches back into the depths of time. Our work is often little changed from the way things were done when the Vikings first settled these valleys. Even our dialect is peppered with Norse words. I like old things, old ways of doing things, old stories, old places, and old people. I’m deeply conservative with a small ‘c’. Ask any half decent economist and they’ll tell you that most new ideas are a waste of time, most new ideas fail. Our way of life results in fairly conservative people suspicious of pointless chatter and new technologies for the sake of newness. I am, in short, about as unlikely to get excited by something like Twitter as anyone alive.

And yet, when he “reluctantly” accepted a cell-phone upgrade, he found that he “could now defend the old in my own quirky and probably misguided way”:

Tweeting is kind of an act of resistance and defiance, a way of shouting to the sometimes disinterested world that you’re stubborn, proud, and not giving in as everywhere else is turned into a clone of everywhere else.

I’m not alone, there are some amazing people tweeting about their lives on Twitter. They are fascinating unique lives that were often invisible before the ability to self-publish on social media. I’d like to think that Twitter has given people that had disappeared from view – obscured and crowded out by the loud noise of modernity – the chance to raise their voice, tell their stories, share their lives, and to say “Hey, we didn’t go away, we are still here, and you might just be interested because what we do is important to everyone.”

Being able to share your life enables other people to see you for the first time, to see past clichés and stereotypes. And since the 1960s farming has had a rather poisonous image for some people. Now, for the first time, lots of folk following us on Twitter actually know a farmer. They know what we do each day and that we are essentially decent people doing our best sometimes against the economic and natural odds. They see that we have a love of what we do, and a deep respect for the landscape and wildlife around us. … Most new ideas may fail, and most new ideas might be rubbish – but sometimes a new idea, a new technology, empowers you to defend the old against the new, and some old things are worth defending.