For those of you who genuinely believe in your heart of hearts that Twitter is important and a legitimate part of our broader social fabric, look away now – for no earthly good can possibly come from reading any further. If you think that the ‘Twitterverse’ is greatest thing to happen since people stopped eating sliced bread, pack up your eyes and take them somewhere else without delay. Shoo! Shoo, I say to you! As for everybody else, huddle up, come close and listen – I think Twitter is a colossal waste of time that threatens to undo much of the good work evolution has done up until now. It’s stupid, it’s nasty and it’s narcissistic. It’s a medium that not so much pitches itself to the lowest common denominator as it does plunge headlong beyond zero and deep into negative territory.
For those of you who genuinely believe in your heart of hearts that Twitter is important and a legitimate part of our broader social fabric, look away now – for no earthly good can possibly come from reading any further. If you think that the ‘Twitterverse’ is greatest thing to happen since people stopped eating sliced bread, pack up your eyes and take them somewhere else without delay. Shoo! Shoo, I say to you! As for everybody else, huddle up, come close and listen – I think Twitter is a colossal waste of time that threatens to undo much of the good work evolution has done up until now. It’s stupid, it’s nasty and it’s narcissistic. It’s a medium that not so much pitches itself to the lowest common denominator as it does plunge headlong beyond zero and deep into negative territory.
Phew! There is no way on earth that I could have gotten all that out in only one hundred and forty characters. Or, if I did, I’d have to sacrifice a whole bunch of perfectly innocent vowels and end up with: ‘twttr, u sck L’ or something equally horrifying. Not for me. I much prefer to say too much than to risk saying too little. When it comes to writing, give me rolling hills of unedited rambling in which I can hike for hours and mountains of prose as dense as the person that wrote it. Anger needs plenty of room to operate and I’d much rather enjoy my hatred in all its unedited and splendid glory.
That said, despite the ubiquitous nature of all that is Twitter, I deeply suspect that I don’t really know what it is. I’ve no idea if it’s something you get on, like a bike or facebook or, for that matter, a morphine drip; or if, instead, it’s not something you choose so much as it chooses you. Whether, much like the priesthood, it is less a choice than it is a calling. Perhaps that’s why they have ‘followers’ on Twitter. For me, it remains a process so mysterious that I have found myself starting to resent it. It now seems that I have reached a stage in my life that something apparently so vital to the rest of humanity has left me wholly untouched.
Despite my Twitter-free existence, I otherwise manage to lead a fairly normal life. Or as normal as is reasonably possible under the circumstances. I get up, go for a run, eat breakfast and go to work. The next day, the whole carnival repeats itself. At no time do I find my text finger beginning to itch or become gripped with the desire to find out what happening in ‘the Twitterverse’.
I don’t think I like the term ‘Twitterverse’ so much. It sounds like a galaxy of idiots. But the term is simply one of many corruptions of the term ‘Twitter’, all of which are designed to make it sound much more important than it actually is. There are tons of variations – tweets (noun), twittering (verb) etc. But despite this, those who participate in Twitter are not referred to as ‘twits’. I would have thought it was obvious. And incredibly accurate.
Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask – I have never been that quick to adapt to technology. After all, I still eye the microwave with suspicion and regard the internet as a form of witchcraft. Not since I got burned by the whole ‘laser disc’ debacle of the mid 1990s have I been able to trust new technology (thanks for nothing, DVD!). In fact, technology is a cruel mistress – the kind that boils your rabbit in crystal clear high definition in a tragically redundant format, but a cruel mistress nevertheless. Let’s face it, I belong to a generation that gleefully disregarded vinyl records in the belief that they were as useless as a mouthful of marbles in favour of getting our hands on as many compact discs as we could, only to find twenty years down the track that long playing records are treated with a reverence more befitting a relic of a lost Incan civilization whilst CDs are – once they’re loaded onto your I-pod – only good for landfill. So perhaps I can be excused if I’m a little bitter, a little gun-shy. Technology has made a fool of me before, and I am yet to forgive it. Perhaps that’s why I despise Twitter so much.
I find it deeply ironic that so many musicians are devoted to Twitter. Lady Gaga has more than ten million followers on Twitter but is yet to release a decent single. Or, at least, one that doesn’t sound eerily like Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself’ (which is itself a pretty weak-at-the-knees facsimile of ‘Respect Yourself’ by the Staple Singers). For those who love Twitter – who tweet and retweet, who await news of trending hashtags with all the breathless anticipation of an asthmatic trumpet player, I would gladly apologise if I thought any of you were able to get this far with your tragically depleted attention spans. No doubt by now you’ve been distracted by a bottletop or a passing car or have asked the question unique to those cursed with far too little to do: I wonder what Nicky Minaj is up to?
Let me put it this way – what use is it? Exactly. For me, I continue to resist. I don’t want to be anyone’s follower. If you disagree, please let me know. In fact, feel free to tweet me at ‘#i don’t particularly care what you think’. After that, go and get a book.