cblj_backup | (no subject)

Okay. Here goes nothing.

Let's preface this: I have been generally acclaimed The Internet's Cranky Old Man. You know that the things I say, I say with love. Vitriol, but love. It's a thing.

Reasons I Hate Twitter

Mandatory Explanation Paragraph:

Twitter, as if ANYONE DOESN'T KNOW, is a social networking site where your posts are limited to 140 characters. You can post for free from a computer or mobile phone. You get one icon, but you can customise the wallpaper behind your posts page if you wish. Twitter is extremely popular, and the newsmedia has an enormous erection for it, which is pretty predictable considering the newsmedia adores sound bites. You can have your "tweets" compiled daily into a single post and post them to your livejournal. If you do this, it is 99% likely I will judge you. (If you've done this, and you're still on my flist, you are exempt, but I've got my eye on you punks. :D )

Rest of the Rant:

There are many reasons people have given me as arguments for joining twitter and tweeting. It's instantaneous communication, it's useful when you don't want to write a livejournal post, it's a fun way to communicate with friends. You can follow celebrities and find out all the details of their daily lives. You can read and post from your phone!

Well, of course it's useful for short posts, because you have to short post. I can see the appeal, because being able to post whenever you feel like it without worrying that people will be pissed you made a 140-character LJ post feeds the Id. Thing is, I don't want to overfeed my Id, it isn't good for it. And I am less than uninterested in being an accessory to other people feeding theirs.

It's very seductive, the idea of posting thoughts as they occur to you, but it's also detrimental to reasoned debate, which is already becoming a lost art. It's easy to write a sentence and fling it out for the world to see. It's a little harder to be funny and pithy at the same time, but honestly...not that hard.

What Twitter discourages is the process of taking a single concept and expanding on it, or making an event in one's life into a story, or turning a question into a discussion.

Granted, sometimes I phone-post, but usually only when I am stuck somewhere or have undergone bodily harm, when there's an actual relatively urgent need to communicate. And even so it's not the same thing, because livejournal encourages and enables discussion. There is no threaded commenting on twitter, so if I open a discussion on a topic, there's no simple way to see people responding to each others' comments on my talking point. Nobody talks to each other -- I talk to the ether, and you talk back to me. This means that Twitter is not a discussion. Twitter is sentences. They're not the same thing. I think the recent mess with James Moran more than adequately proves this.

People have said that it's fun to follow celebrities on Twitter, and no doubt it is entertaining, but honestly I don't care. I don't read their blogs either. I am glad that they are successful entertainers and I am entertained by them when they perform, but I don't need to know that they had a great workout at the gym. It's irrelevant to me.

Twitter regiments all the joy out of writing. As an exercise, being pithy is fine; as a way of life, it's absurd. The reason we have so many words is so that we can communicate with depth and brilliance of meaning. I'm not interested in the concept of contextless communication, and I think twitter highly encourages passive-aggressive behaviour. It's very hard to tell a complete story in 140 characters and very easy to make a manipulative statement that forces people to pay attention to you, which rewards negative behaviour. Passive-aggression exists at all levels of digital interaction, but when using Twitter you have an ironclad excuse for demanding that people ask you about what you just said. You simply couldn't give them more context or clarify your statements! You only have 140 characters.

If I want to talk to my friends, I email them or I make a post on LJ, where I can write as much as I like and actually see peoples' comments and how they interact. While I don't agree with everything said in this article, and while it is addressing text-messages, I think the last few sentences at least make a fair point about the potential for miscommunication.

Also, and believe me I researched this thoroughly, apparently nobody's having twitter-sex. What kind of social platform doesn't facilitate cybersex?

(Really, this is it, and it's more about how you can follow porn stars on twitter. YAWN. I might write a story about actual Twitter sex later if I can be bothered.)

Now. ALL THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, I realised the other day that perhaps I was misreading Twitter's function as a communication tool. If we set aside my instinctive dislike of anything that limits interaction so rigidly, perhaps I'm applying my personal tastes to the general, which is a fallacy.

Essentially: just because I don't care what bar you're partying at doesn't mean you don't care when the last time I had a sandwich was.

Maybe people kept telling me to get a Twitter account because this stuff really does interest them. I don't hold up my personal taste as a gold standard; I don't like a lot of things that other people like, or that I ought to like, so this isn't sneering or snobbery. It simply never occurred to me that someone would care about this stuff.

So it's a wrongheaded assumption to make, that just because I don't like it nobody should, and I'm willing to admit when I'm wrongheaded. The corollary seems egotistical -- that people want to read the random trivia of my life -- but otherwise I can't figure out why people care so very much that I'm not tweeting.

Having got my dislike of Twitter off my chest, allow me to announce that I'm tweeting. OH WHATEVER STOP LAUGHING.

I do want to make a few things clear:

1. This is a broadcast account. I'm not following anyone on it. I can barely deal with the social politics of LJ, you guys!
2. Of the fifty-odd followers currently, only three were pre-informed: Foxy, Nick, and Simon, who talked/cajoled/shamed me into it. The rest found me randomly or through them.
3. I have been known to reply, but @ing me isn't a guarantee.
3a. Why yes, my icon is super awesome.

It will not be fed to my LJ page, because that's insanely annoying. But it's there, and having taken it out for a test spin in the past few weeks I appear to be able to make use of it on a regular basis. So if that's your bag, have fun. I don't get it, but I realised that I don't actually have to.

http://twitter.com/ouija_sam/

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

florahart

I have a twitter account. People follow it. This is LOLarious as I ain't GOT a cell, so I would only tweet from a computer where I might as well .........post. Oh, and I do follow accounts, but this is largely because there are accounts for things like IJ or Dreamwidth, where I can then find out if they have downtime without having to remember how to find them. Heh.

However, I would note that for you, you could choose to use it to preview your posts of hilariousness such as conversations with R, which are often in small segments anyway.

*nods*

Edited Date: 2009-07-19 01:46 am (UTC)

From:

phaetonschariot.livejournal.com

haha I have a phone but I don't really go out of the house that much. Just to run errands and like... the supermarket and the vet are both five minutes walk away, I might as well wait til I get home. The petstore where I get litter is further away, and sometimes I go to the mall, but that's about it.

From:

spiderine.livejournal.com

Hmmmm... I disagree that Twitter is not a discussion medium. I have discussions on Twitter all day long; so do Foxy and Nick and C and a whole bunch of other people. But you have to *FOLLOW* people in order to see the discussion, Sam! In other words, as much as I adore you:

TWITTER: UR DOIN IT RONG.

(P.S. Also, there are twitter clients that let you see the discussions in threaded form.)

Edited Date: 2009-07-19 01:47 am (UTC)

From:

copperbadge.livejournal.com

Perhaps I should have clarified my definition of discussion -- that's possibly a conversation, but even so the 140 characters thing highly limits the amount of information one can convey. I was thinking of discussion in terms of more than two people, and also in terms of something people can opt out of if uninterested. If I friended people? I'd have to read those discussions. Which while held by people I love dearly as friends, again, are not necessarily of interest to me. Just like I rarely read comments on posts.

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