All A-twitter? Er … Not So Much
Friday, January 30th, 2009It had to happen sooner or later. I think I’ve finally found a corner of the social networking universe that I’ll never warm up to, no matter how hard I try.
Previously, I’ve written about my skepticism over things like social bookmarking, online news aggregators and Facebook — all of which eventually won me over, once I gave them a fair shot.
More recently, I’ve been trying to make friends with Twitter, but try as I might, I still don’t get it. Although I dearly want to join the rest of humanity and fall in love with Twitter, I simply can’t do it. In fact, I think it’s one of the most annoying things to hit the Internet since blinking banner ads.
I understand how big Twitter has become. I’ve read all the stories. I’ve seen the glowing, praise-filled posts. I’ve encountered the links and badges and widgets all over the Web. I stumble across the references each and every day. I know that Twitter, like some kind of digital-age Lassie, has become the constant friend of millions, and like Lassie has saved a few lives and even helped at least one person win freedom from foreign imprisonment.
But as awesome as Lassie might be, I don’t really want a collie sitting on my lap all day long.
Now, to be perfectly fair, I haven’t given Twitter a full, wholehearted trial. I signed up for an account and I started “following” a few folks, just to get a feel for how it really works. What I haven’t done is “tweeted” (that’s the term for posting or updating, in case you weren’t sure) very much myself, nor have I gone out and enlisted other people to “follow” me. It’s possible, just barely possible, that if I did that, if I really threw myself into it, I’d start to feel the love. But for now, I just don’t see the point of going any further than I already have.
In all honesty, I find myself getting really bored when I try to follow others’ Twitter activity. Even in the case of an author I admire, who is a dedicated (Twitterer? Tweeter? Twitter Head?), I simply can’t muster any enthusiasm for hearing from him five, six, seven times a day or more, especially when the news consists of things like “having coffee” or “going to eat lunch” or “looking at YouTube.” Occasionally, I discover something new — a link to an interesting Web site, a tip about something I missed on the news. From time to time there will be a tweet that makes me smile or even laugh out loud. The rest of the time it’s just … life, I suppose. Somebody else’s life, about as humdrum as mine.
Maybe if I participated a bit more, if I was responsive instead of just receptive, I’d be able to grasp the ongoing, free-flowing conversational appeal of it all, instead of feeling that each tweet was interrupting me to tell me something I didn’t need to know. But then I’d face the other problem — trying to find the time and inclination to carry on essentially endless conversations with five, ten or an entire horde of people, all doing things I don’t really care about at the same time that I’m busy doing things that probably bore them to tears.
Who does have the time for that, really? Aren’t we all supposed to be doing something more meaningful with our lives? Don’t we all have something better or more important to do than shooting basically empty sentence fragments around the ether sixteen hours every day? The more I think about those questions, the more concerned I get about the people who do enjoy Twitter. Maybe I’m just a cranky old fart … or maybe there’s really something wrong with them.
In a nutshell, I understand the theory of Twitter. I just don’t grasp it in practice. It’s probably the same problem that has prevented me from ever really embracing instant messaging. I’ve tried it, of course, but I much prefer e-mail or even chat rooms to those annoying little messenger windows that pop up and demand a response every time you’re trying to accomplish some real work. If I had a choice over how to be annoyed, I’d take a blinking banner ad assaulting me with its aggressive eye candy any day.
Because I’m open-minded, I’m suspectible to changing my opinion about Twitter. I’ll keep dabbling my toes in the water, and perhaps I’ll even get the courage to take a bigger leap into the deep end of the pool. I’m also willing to be persuaded by any convincing arguments that anyone would care to make. Until then, however, I remain unconvinced and sadly certain that this one particular phenomenon will simply be passing me by.