I am a tech geek. I like gadgets. I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to smooth, sexy, functional interfaces. I want the PC Guy and Mac Kid to just get along. But despite knowing that someone had decided that something called Twitter was The Hot Thing a couple of years ago at South By Southwest Interactive, I avoided it.
I didn't get it. I could already send and receive texts, the beauty of which was that, barring drunkenness, I could be very specific about who I sent information/drunken proclamations of love to, and who I was likely to receive the same things from. My friends couldn't fathom my resistance, especially coming from a techy geek like me. It was, to them, sort of like the fact that I'm a vegetarian that doesn't particularly care for fruits or vegetables.
I finally, with much intervention, including that of my friend Allison, whose brother was one of the originators of Blogger, and then one of the originators of Twitter, twice simultaneously unleashing brilliant usefulness and poxes upon the Earth.
I felt obligated to try it, and then, months later, to actually understand it. My eventual understanding of it was that you could type into your computer or mobile device your location, intentions, or momentary hopes and dreams, and people who virtually "followed" you would get your entries as texts on their mobile devices. Sort of like a very passive form of stalking, with consent. Also, I thought, extremely pointless. This is what email and, again, text messaging, were for, as far as I could tell, and all Twitter was doing was inserting another step in the process, and inviting everyone to know my business. It was creepy, and clearly for the narcissistic, people who needed to feel unique and special in a world flooded with data and words and little real contact.
But I persevered, venturing further into the Tweeting world, convinced that either everyone knew and saw something I didn't, or I would get immense joy when they realized they were all idiots.
I would clearly be lying if I didn't find some of it amusing, and I'd be like one of those people who claim TV is garbage that is somehow beneath them.
Some of my friends really are funny. There's that. Mostly... not.
That young, hip librils have embraced it is a non-story, but I love that conservatives have picked it up. It's become the battlefield for the Republicans mouthpieces who are all trying to tell each other and their followers that they're not REAL Republicans, failing to see that underneath it all, they (the Limbaughs, Cheneys, Steeles, and McCains) are really the same - self-interested blowhards, which kind of makes Twitter a natural medium for them.
Some of the people I know that use Twitter are almost certainly Twittering about their paranoid delusions, sometimes referred to as Libertarianism, and including rants about the government and the UN tracking their every move, interspersed between Tweets about their drug use and political activities, like painting "Ron Paul" on playground equipment. I do not follow them, though, because I'd like to be surprised when they finally decide to launch their "reLoveution". Hilarity will ensue.
My phone will beep and rattle at 4:25am on the tv tray that serves as a nightstand, with a Tweet waking me to tell me someone is having trouble sleeping, and I wonder if there's a chain of causality she's failing to recognize.
Another friend Tweets that she's excited because she's on her way to spend some quality time with an old friend. Later, she will take time out from having a great time to Tweet that she is having a great time, which reminds me, if not her, of the proper definition of irony.
For one week, I decided to Twitter exclusively about my bowel movements. I thought people would relate to it, given the popularity of the book that insists that everybody poops. If people felt it necessary to inform me of what kind of cereal they ate that morning, with no editorializing about the enjoyability of it or the deep-rooted doubts it stirred in them, then surely people should care if things were going well in my lower intestine. It also helped them understand my particular, like-clockwork schedule, not only of my ablutions, but of avoiding work for up to 15 minutes:
11:01am - Typically, this is my time to eliminate (pardon pun) a good 1/4 hour of my morn. Will repeat in the PM, my way of stickin' it to the man.
10:27am (a different day - I do have some work ethic) - "Tweeting live from luxurious Mike Bloomberg Bathroom Facility. They've used some kind of floral fragrance. Feel woozy. Things going well."
11:06am (you see the pattern. the afternoon session was usually just for Sudoku) - Guy two doors down really trying too hard. I'm trying not to laugh. Relax, dude, and drink more water.
I thought this might start something. Or at least get people to stop following me. It was a protest, a raging against the dying of the word, against, pardon the predicatability, the machine.
But, no... I found myself looking at the phone, expectantly. Waiting for a text message, someone I knew, or didn't know, Tweeting, "OMG. Rob is f-ing hilarious. Everyone should follow him. Everyone should tell him he's special."
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