I MAY be the last journalist in the world to do Twitter.

Not the last person, of course, because only around 300 million of our 7bn global population are actively tweeting. When I decided last month to do two things for Lent - give up sugar and start tweeting - I knew I was coming to this social media game late, and I also had a long inventory of reasons why I had put off committing to Twitter this long. Top of the list was not, by the way, fear of trolls. It was more basic than that: what bothered me was that here was another job to do, another distraction, and as a mother of two young children I felt the last thing I needed was another reason to be looking at a screen while running the bath, cooking tea or playing Top Trumps. I thought there was more than enough information in my life.

As part of getting started, I decided, throughout my 40 days of Lent, to receive news only through Twitter, and thus, I hoped, learn to love the portals it opens onto the world's happenings, anxieties, concerns and viral pleasures. But, my, it's tough, and, though I've only been on it for a few weeks I feel I'm already in the grip of offence-fatigue, of outrage-weariness, of wondering if I really care enough about the things I say I care about. Already, I find I am feeling a little alienated from many of the very causes I espouse.

Over the past three weeks the tweets coming into my feed have arrived as waves of anger and indignation, mainly at the sexism, racism or homophobia of some person or other. If you miss one, you only have to wait about 24 hours and there'll be another. There was Jeremy Clarkson, was involved in an alleged "fracas" with a colleague, but generally gets criticised for being smug, boorish and occasionally racist.

Then there's Ukip MEP David Coburn, who caused shock when he referred to Humza Yousaf as "or as I call him, Abu Hamza"; retiring Labour MP David Hamilton who called Nicola Sturgeon a "wee lassie in a tin helmet", and now Mark Hughes, who tweeted an unprintable homophobic message about Ruth Davidson. And oh, yes, The Sun newspaper, again and again, churning out its images of politician's head stuck on the top of sexy, objectified female bodies. Dealing with these issues is so exhausting it's hard to even begin to think about global violence, inequality, victims of grooming or the conflict in Syria, let alone what to give my kids for breakfast.

Of course, it's tempting to have your say on all of them -though actually I've mostly resisted. On one occasion I wrote a tweet about Katie Hopkins - who had compared our First Minister with Ebola - then immediately deleted it mainly because I couldn't believe that this was my life, tweeting about Hopkins. Possibly the best response I've seen to sexism was the tin hat craze, in which feminists and Sturgeon-supporters posted images of themselves, their dogs, a hamster and the Mona Lisa, wearing pots and pans on their heads in protest at David Hamilton's "wee lassie" comment.

Jon Ronson's gripping exploration of the way social media has become a forum for shaming, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, has been published. So, you could say, I have been publicly warned. It's not just that Ronson's stories of people who found their lives blighted because of careless social media remarks or actions, elicit sympathy. There is also an argument here: shaming doesn't work, doesn't produce the desired social or personal change.

Being on Twitter has made me more anxious. Everything on it seems so important. Everything demands attention - and immediately. One of the things I've loved in my career as a journalist is the moment I call "the pause", when I step back for a short while from my instinctive reaction to a world event and question it. Perhaps I dig around behind the story; perhaps I find evidence to undermine my response. The problem is that Twitter permits no pause, you either react immediately or don't.

It seems that David Hamilton didn't pause to think before he made his "off the cuff" remark about the tin helmet. But then nor did many of the people who reacted to him, or any of the stories listed here. They probably thought there was no need for pause: racism, homophobia and sexism, after all, are wrong. But, the pause isn't just about knowing what's wrong; it's also about thinking up the most effective way to react to it. Outrage and offence aren't enough. Baying for someone's resignation is often not the answer.

We surely want people to change because they see what they do is wrong, not because they're scared of the Twitter mob. That's why projects like Jean Urquhart's new campaign against racism, #notmyxenophobia, and Laura Bates's Everyday Sexism Project do represent part of the answer. They draw attention to the sin, not the sinner, and demand we act with compassion, not fear.

There is an upside here. Because compassion is out there on Twitter too. It's just often we are too blinded to it by the #rage.

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