It's said you're a mean shot around parliament with a Nerf gun. Why do you have one?

Why not? Somebody gave me a Nerf gun and because my office is over a quad, I thought we'd have a go and test it. It says on the packet it can reach 30 metres. Really, it was a consumer rights issue.

Were you disappointed?

No, I hit him! I didn't realise my colleague was in a meeting at the time, but he left his windows open. But Iain Wright [Labour MP for Hartlepool] was a very good sport about it. Surely that's the point about technology: to explore it and see if it works.

How has technology changed the lives of MPs?

Oh, fundamentally. And one of the reasons I'm excited about the future is technology, but it's always been a source of frustration to me that I'm not very technologically capable. I went to a coding lesson at a school and was trying to make my Gruffalo breakdance and there were eight-year-old children going: "No, you've got that all wrong."

MPs have really taken to Twitter – they sent almost a million messages in 2013. Isn't that excessive?

Well, it depends. If you're tweeting your press releases that's not very interactive. If you are having conversations with people, that is opening a way of networking and connecting with people that previously was harder to do because of the physical time and place. I dread to think how many I sent in 2013.

How many do you think?

Well [checks phone] I'm up to 41,000, but I joined in 2008. [Creasy sent 12,739 in 2013, putting her third on the list of parliament's top tweeters.] If it's a numbers game, it's about quality not quantity.

Are you generally an early adopter?

I joined Jelly the other week, but it's not sticky enough for me. The same for Depop – the one about selling – and I gave up on Snapchat quite quickly because I got bored with it. But I do use Vine.

Who's your favourite person on Twitter?

Will.i.am or Jedward because of the sheer surrealism of what they tweet. Every time I look at it I just can't help it, I'm like: "I love these people!" Their inside voice is being used outside, that is genius.

In what ways has technology made your life worse?

I have to admit finding somebody tweeting a picture of me in the mosh pit at the Wedding Present was quite upsetting. I'm not a celebrity – politics is showbusiness for ugly people, isn't it? – but I was not being your MP, I was just dancing. Badly. And I've obviously had a very negative experience of technology in terms of [abuse from trolls on] online media and Twitter, but I'm very clear with people that that's not about Twitter, it's about the idiots who are using it.

What gadget would you like to see invented?

It sort of has been invented, but I recently got to play with some Google Glasses. They were so exciting. On a very basic level, as I get older, they would be quite useful to buttress my ageing memory.

Is phone etiquette important?

I've never really thought about it, but I do have my phone on silent most of the time. I really enjoy the fact that if you do speaking events, you can now interact with the audience online and offline. When I first did it, I was doing a Labour student event and some girl tweeted: "Stella's got really horrible hair." So I tweeted her back: "Well how would you cut it then?" But traditionally, you'd get one or two questions; it's not very participative, not very empowering for people because it's not a real dialogue or a relationship. That's different now.

Does it alarm you that when people do have the power they are often abusive?

That's why it's important to call people out. That's why I will respond: "Oh hi, yeah, I've read that because this is a public forum." But our culture is changing and we need more voices not fewer.

Time travel – when would you go to?

Forwards or backwards? It sounds like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and of course the question is: are you Bill or are you Ted? Oooh, I guess I'd go into the future to know that it was worth fighting for. Cheesy but true. And then I'd check the lottery numbers.

You're a very competitive pub quizzer. Have they been ruined by smartphones?

I bloody hope not. My phone stays in my bag when I'm at the McGuffins [film and TV quiz]. It's all up here [taps forehead]. The whole thing about doing pub quizzes is that it's fun and it's competitive, and it's not really fun and competitive if you delegate it to your phone. So I absolutely morally object to people cheating in pub quizzes. But blame the person, not the technology.