Twitter my butt!!
April 24, 2009
Twitter, my butt. Seriously. Who the hell cares that I’m drinking coffee, or that I’ve had a particularly satisfying dump, or that I’m in my car driving on the freakin’ 401 while thumbing my Blackberry???? Our lives are not interesting enough for Twitter. As a species, we’re dull as dishwater most of the time. I don’t see the appeal. I’d rather have a conversation, look someone in the eye, hear a voice. There are some very creative, witty, and ultimately interesting Twitter entries but most I’ve seen are dull and stupid as rocks. Clearly, there is a profound need for the artists, the poets, the writers, the thinkers, the philosophers…to step up and push the dull-minded idiots aside. And my disdain for Facebook is not a secret. The writers of such brilliant (Facebook) updates like: “So-and-So is getting ready for work” or “So-and-So is drinking coffee” or "So-and-So is happy her day is over” or “So-and-So is hating the snow” need to be publicly embarrassed, humiliated, and called out as idiotic and uninteresting. They ought to be ridiculed. Having said this, I’m on Twitter, and Facebook. Twitter, I ignore. I was curious. Now, I’m not. Facebook, I mostly hate but for a whole bunch of reasons, I tolerate. For the record, here’s what I’m doing right now: I’m typing this blog entry while listening to my wife on the phone who is talking about renting an RV for a week this summer. (Case in point: this is insipid, banal detail, and who the hell cares?)
Leonard Cohen, in his recent interview with CBC's Jian Ghomeshi, talked about the preponderance of slogans -- that he would write a verse and then work it until he understood it AND it did not resemble a slogan. Facebook is mostly slogans. Twitter is all slogan -- no content. Headline after headline after mind-numbing headline, and no stories.
10 Comments
1. Mike Gravel had this to say: Apr 24, 2009 ~ 13:58 ~ #
Thanks for this. You’ve summed up my thoughts perfectly. For personal uses, Twitter offers very little. As a communication system, a news delivery system, it has potential. I tried it for a time and don’t really care for it, but I do see its potential. Kottke wrote a good piece on this recently and linked to a bunch of courter arguments:
http://www.kottke.org/09/04/in-defense-of-twitter
I’m not planning on updating my Twitter account any time soon.
As for Facebook…hate it. Won’t join it.
2. Adam Snider had this to say: Apr 24, 2009 ~ 14:05 ~ #
While I understand your point of view, Thomas, I think that there is sometimes a certain beauty in the mundane, so it’s not necessarily terrible that it’s being shared.
As for Twitter being useless…well, there’s a lot more noise than signal. But, I find that I’ve been exposed to a lot of information that I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to and I’ve made some connections with interesting and intelligent people via Twitter, as well.
As for Facebook statuses, well, yeah, they’re lame, but I’ll keep posting that I’m in desperate need of caffeine. ;)
3. thomas had this to say: Apr 24, 2009 ~ 14:14 ~ #
I’m not immune from posting idiotic mundane crap. I’m guilty. And I have a real fondness for the everyday…routines, patterns, rituals (formal or otherwise)...but I also see the beauty in these routines…in my waking moments. But I see so little beauty on Facebook, and Twitter. It is the mundane, sans beauty, and that makes me sad.
4. Mike Gravel had this to say: Apr 24, 2009 ~ 14:30 ~ #
I love that you’re renting an RV, by the way. I expect a suite of poems dealing with the romance of traveling by land yacht.
5. Patrick had this to say: Apr 24, 2009 ~ 15:04 ~ #
I hear you dude. I find very little redeeming merit to 90% of Facebook, besides its rather mercenary potential for rapid networking and event promotion. Mainly, I don’t trust it to have its users’ interests at heart. It seems like a giant sales scam in social network clothing (I’m waiting for the day it rips off its dress and says “Tada! I’m the one spamming your stored email accounts and web page contact forms.”)
I have no personal use for twitter, but I agree that it does have potential. I imagine for devoted users it feels good to always be in contact with other humans, but I think I would find it way too stressful to keep up. If I had a spare moment to write a tweet, I’d quite frankly rather use it to sip tea and watch squirrels mate on the neighbours roof. Guess I’m a poor candidate for the digital hive mind.
6. smsteele had this to say: Apr 25, 2009 ~ 07:32 ~ #
I have never tweeted
I FB publicize (v little)...
we Thomas, of an age,
remember uncles
sitting at kitchen tables
drinking rye whiskey
on Saturday afernoons
b.s.‘ing for hours & hours,
lighting cigarette after
cigarette, while we tugged
at fathers’ pant-leg,
“can we go home, can we
go home?”
we learned story,
narrative, punchline,
that it was okay to spend time
drinking rye and b.s.‘ing
for an entire afternoon,
that a story might take
25 minutes to tell
(or an entire night
if one is a true machair)
and the FB/Twitter gen
have only 25 seconds,
their Sesame Street brains,
their gamer brains,
wired so different…
better? worse?
just different
sms
p.s. but there’s an entire story waiting to be told in that tantalizing line, “my wife is on the phone trying to rent an RV for a week this summer”...
7. Daniel Poitras had this to say: Apr 27, 2009 ~ 05:14 ~ #
I can see the allure of Facebook. Makes you feel kinda like a rock star. Some kind of literary God that needs to be worshiped and appeased.
Best of all I think it’s a throw back to Highschool. All the popular kids have the most facebook friends and the coolest status updates and the most little games and quizes and the most ‘pokes’ and ‘likes’ and such. It’s not so much a social networking tool as a “most popular kid in school” generator. No real different then when blogs were all the rag and everybody had to be on MySpace.
9. thomas had this to say: Apr 28, 2009 ~ 23:37 ~ #
I love it that you have an RV Elena!
Adam, I hear you man. Without the mundane, there can be no extraordinary. Hey, I’m still trying to get over the fact that I’m important enough to have a cell phone. I’m not actually. I don’t do, or say anything important enough to warrant that sort of privileged instant communication. Doctors are….not me.
10. Kyla C. had this to say: May 01, 2009 ~ 09:13 ~ #
I was talking about this very same thing (Twitter) with a friend of mine the other day! I’d looked into it, and compulsively set up an account (“it’s just that EASY!” ) and was all ready to go, when I discovered I could Twitter via text message.
This unraveled any kind of mildly interested thought I’d had prior, because it dawned on me that I would probably Twitter via my phone and that would be fun and savvy, but could I actually be bothered to go and view it and the twits of others…ever? And if I couldn’t bother to go and view my own asinine comments about disliking Edmonton drivers, and yet I would still Twitter about them, what exactly did this mean about me?
It meant that it was easier to fill the Internet up with literal white noise tinted with the burnt ochre of a very normal narcissism. Now, instead of simply existing and living in a throng of people, the life of the throng is captured in every little moment deemed presentable (and oftentimes not) in words.
I agree somewhat with Dan about Facebook, but would like to add that it sucks some of the magic out of life— I wanted to run into “that guy that I haven’t seen since….” in a really strange incident involving a jellyfish, high tide and the sea shore, not on Facebook. Now when these random incidents occur, they seem much less significant, because the first thing we say to each other is, “Ohh…I saw that picture of you and your kid on Facebook. So…you reproduced eh?”