so, i decided, after discussion with a few people, to join twitter. my friend and i talked about the silly funny profound things people tweet about as we mined lists of followers. fascinating. i've gone and followed scores of "people" who run the gamut from news organizations to poets to museums to corpses. clever or dry, i haven't lacked reading material these last 48 hours.
here's what i find: i have never felt more distant, less connected. i now follow 94 entities. any friends who twitter are lost in a sea of bbc updates and pearls from perez hilton. i'm being followed by many, many pervs and strangers for reasons unknown. i know why i follow hugh jackman, for instance, but, seriously, my photo is hardly the female equivalent. and how do these people recognize my genius from the few words of my bio? in fairness, that Horny Kitty does seem astute....
maybe i started too fast and am suffering from a virtual brainfreeze. dunno. i'll sleep on it for a few days and see how i feel about it. i only have a few hours in the morning and evening to check on this stuff and i suppose for me, at this time, i'd rather sit across from people i know than read (however interesting) what shiloh joile-pitt is sharing. we'll see. for now, i choose what's real.
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I'm glad to hear it. I was a bit baffled when I saw you had jumped on the twitter bandwagon, as your thoughts and ideas deserve more room to breathe, and a reader who has an attention span longer than a gnat on crack (to quote a colleague who often is frustrated with his students :)
ReplyDeleteI can lose myself in the Facebook accounts of my "friends," sifting through their quiz results, their "Living Social" choices, their flair, and, of course, their status updates. But twitter? I just don't get it.
So... avoid the virtual brainfreeze and spend your precious morning and evening hours more responsibly - on Facebook ;)
it has merit - if you want to keep up with news and celebs (michael ian black is funny as hell, so is stephen hawking) but it's hardly a point of contact for friends. let me qualify that - if i had access all day, i might feel differently. but i don't. so i don't.
ReplyDeleteit is kinda pretty, though, with all the words and symbols.
well twitters 4 really smart peeple. you might try facebook.
ReplyDeletedear chuck, xoxoxoxoxo
ReplyDeleteTwitter is like the pet rock. It's a fleeting fad that allowed people who shouldn't own pets to pretend they actually can own and care for one. Likewise, twitter allows people who have no attention span to actually pretend they do, or maintain the illusion that anyone really cares about their mundane life. And let's face it, for those people, 140 characters is probably "too much information" so it all works out. It's like a rest stop on the information superhighway with a big sign that says, "Free parking and refreshments for short buses!"
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