For those about to Twitter ...

I was on the Internet long before AOL, embraced e-mail in its infancy, put up a few web pages when you still had to know some basic HTML to do it. I've had online photo albums for years, I'm still slogging away with this dumb blog and I even flirted briefly with Facebook. So I don't consider myself some kind of Andy Rooney luddite, still scratching my head over the Zip Code system. But I still don't get Twitter.

If you don't know what Twitter is, fine. Perhaps we are kindred spirits and let's just enjoy this moment. If you do, that's fine too. I come not to judge.

Because really, my thinking on this is mixed. We already have the attention spans of Mediterranean fruit flies, and I'm not 100 percent sold on on anything that makes them even shorter. On the other hand, who has time, what with gas prices and the war in Iraq, to put together complete sentences? Twitter asks nothing in this regard and gives much. You riff about about what you're doing, and you get to read the riffs of friends about what they're doing, or what they think you're doing.

Except you're not doing it, and neither are they. The whole premise of Twitter is that you use it while you're ostensibly doing something else. This necessarily means that your attention is elsewhere. You can focus on a crappy episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, or a drug intervention with a beloved relative, or you can twitter. You can't really do both. When people say they're finishing that Balzac novel, or baking brownies, or teaching the kids a valuable lesson about honesty, they're lying. At that precise moment, they're twittering. It is self-evident that their eyes are on the screen, and their hands are on the keyboard. The novel gets kicked under the couch, the brownies burn, the kids wander away to play in the street. What you read in the ephemeral parade of Twitter posts is what people would be doing if they weren't twittering.

Is that a bad thing? I don't know. If stream-of-consciousness text messages bring you closer to people you like but might otherwise ignore, that's probably good. If you have 295,000 "followers" you never heard of, maybe not. Followers on Twitter are like friends on Facebook: they multiply like locusts and they will not be there for you should things go south.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Me neither. But I have recently joined something called FriendFeed which is similar but much better. If you are interested, Google it (it is a Google product). It is integrated into Google Reader, "shared items" etc, and you can import your blog and so on into it. Hence your "friends" can see what you like, and all can comment on it.
Trouble is, I was introduced to Friend Feed by some hard-core biologists, and I don't understand a lot of what they are saying. I need a few readers and editors on there!
June 30, 2008 at 5:25 PM
Dave Knadler said…
I've heard of FriendFeed -- evidently it also has a better approach to the scaling problem that leaves Twitter inaccessible so much of the time.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough friends to make either one worthwhile.
July 1, 2008 at 10:20 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine
Read more

That ship has sunk

Image
After a long career in journalism, I'm back in the job market. For a limited time only. All I require are a company car, a five-figure signing bonus and a six-figure salary. If somebody could swing by and clean the house once a week, that would be great too. Until then, guess who's going to be blogging like there's no tomorrow. I've worked at various newspapers for the better part of three decades. I've been a reporter and an editor and there was a time in the mid '90s when I thought I was being very clever by learning HTML. I was thinking: Job security, baby; every newspaper will be on the Internet in a few years. I was right about the last part. But it turns out most people eventually questioned the wisdom of paying for what they could get free. Who knew? Then circulation and ad revenue headed south, and corporate boards figured they could maintain profits by shrinking the product and letting people go. Now circulation and ad revenue are Thelma and Louise: st
Read more

Back to the keyboard -- but it's a new one

Image
After a writing hiatus of quite a few months longer than I intended, I'm back to work on what I will refer to as "the book." I knocked out another 500 words yesterday, and expect to make that the standard day's output. But since I've had these productive impulses before, and since they tend to expire after about a week, I'm employing a few other strategies. First: A new computer! Yep, I have decided that there are too many games on my desktop machine, it's too noisy, and it confines me to one room of the house. So I ordered a new notebook computer from Dell. It's their new 1420 model. Should be here in a couple more weeks -- although you never know with Dell -- and then the only files I'll transfer from my old computer to the new one are my in-progress writing projects. I know what you're thinking: Basically, I'm offering myself a cheap bribe to a commit to a project that will probably take a year -- long after the shiny new computer cease
Read more