Ruminations on Twitter

I'm not so sure about this whole Twitter thing.

Even while everyone around me seems to be succumbing to the succubus that is Twitter, I stand firm in my refusal to tweet.

Look, I'll be the first to admit that I'm certainly self-obsessed enough that I think everybody wants to know what I am doing and thinking...but I'm also self-aware enough to know that nobody gives a shit that I'm watching Oprah or feeding my betta fish. I would never have trouble finding something to tweet about. But to my way of thinking, that doesn't mean I should just go ahead and do it.

There's a certain point that's all too easy to reach these days where we become over-connected: emailing, texting, Facebook status updating, IMing, and talking on the phone all at once is WAY too much. Add in tweeting, and without a doubt, everyone knows what you're doing all the time. I don't want everyone to know what I'm doing all the time, nor do I want to know what all my friends are doing. It's information overload; and on top of that, it makes life less interesting. There's something to be said for not knowing: in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the kooky--yet reliably insightful--Stevie Nicks said, "I don't have a computer or a cell phone, because I don't want to be that available to anybody. I'm all about mystery. Little girls think it's necessary to put all their business on MySpace and Facebook, and I think it's a shame."

She's right. It's far more interesting to hear about something if you didn't already know it because of a tweet, or a Facebook status, or a MySpace blog. And if one of your friends feels the need to tell you something in person, you can be sure it's not going to be as inane as something they might tweet about.

As for the assertion that Twitter can somehow be used as a tool for journalism, the very idea kind of makes me want to vomit. Sure, it's an easy way to quickly disseminate information to the masses--but it can just as easily be used for misinformation. People were are all abuzz about the tweets coming out of India during the attacks on Mumbai last year. Congressmen and women were on Twitter during President Obama's faux State of the Union. So what? That's not journalism. Just as many bullshit lies are perpetrated on Twitter as actual facts are reported. Reports of the Dalai Lama's Twitter account are greatly exaggerated. (As were the ones attributed to Maya Angelou, the TV show "Mad Men," etc., etc.) Jared from Subway is not dead, as was reported on Twitter. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) accidentally revealed a secret congressional trip to Iraq by tweeting that he had landed in Baghdad. Journalists are great because they function as gatekeepers of information, trying to separate the real from the phony. Twitter has no gatekeepers, nor is it designed to. That's fine, but not for something that people hail as the future of news.

For now, I'm standing firm in my refusal to open a Twitter account. Unless something drastic happens, I don't ever see that changing.

Besides, there are too many potential slip-ups when trying to use the past tense of "tweet." Think about it...