Surprise! Haligonians take to Twitter to complain
What Halifax hates enough to Tweet about
By: Victoria Walton
Whether you laugh about spilling your morning coffee on the way to work or not, Andrew Bourke sees a lot of humour in the things people in Halifax complain about.
He runs the Twitter account @Hooberbloob, and recently found his newsfeed full of “locavores,” people who tweet about local news and activism. With the help of his followers, Bourke compiled a list of the issues that people in Halifax are ranting about on social media. It then turned into a game: Halifax Outrage Bingo.
These days, more and more people are turning to social media to complain or rant.
“Whereas before Twitter, you wouldn’t hear of these things unless it affected you in your day and someone phoned it in to CBC,” says Bourke. “Now, everyone is doing it.”
An instant audience is also important in contributing
to Twitter’s popularity.
“Whether you have twenty followers or a thousand, you know people are going to hear that,” says Bourke. “People can easily pile on, they can retweet, they can say, ‘Yeah that happened to me’, and it just seems to snowball.”
This time of year, we can all guess what the most complaints are about.
“At the very top it would be sidewalk clearing and plows… either too much salt down somewhere or not enough. Driving and especially parking is a big one,” says Bourke. “We’ve got a lot of accounts that tweet live traffic updates, and Metro Transit gets a lot of heat lately.”
Although Bourke thinks city officials and business owners that the complaints are directed towards probably don’t see or read the tweets, they do often point out some real issues in the community, like the importance of snow removal for people with limited mobility.
As for the next big trend in local outrage, Bourke thinks the IKEA announcement will take the lead.
“IKEA’s big…all the instant outrage about the Victoria General Hospital’s deplorable conditions being completely eclipsed by IKEA. Everything is IKEA,” says Bourke. “I think there will be outrage from local advocates that it will destroy local mom-and-pop shops, but we’ve seen that before with things like Wal-Mart, so I don’t know.”
After much research into Dalhousie’s social media, the Gazette has compiled a similar list — Dalhousie Outrage Bingo — to help us laugh about the things we all find a little — or a lot — annoying.
