Twitter, I am breaking up with you

• By Alison
• 20 January, 2010
• 13 Comments

Dear Twitter, 

there was a time, when our relationship was new and shiny, where I woke up in the morning with a feeling of titillating excitement at what I might have missed while I wasted time sleeping. I devoured the new tweets with fervour, eager to begin tweeting my own events of the day.

At first I carefully checked out each new follower, and blocked those who I deemed not worthy (or not real).

And then I started to follow more and more people, and more people started to follow me. I grew tired of checking out porn, so I gave a cursory glance to their timeline, and chose to follow based on that.

And with more followers, I got more tweets.

And more.

And more.

And soon, when I awoke, my twitter app no longer gave me all the tweets I’d missed, but stopped at 200, leaving me with gaping hours of missing tweets.

And yet I didn’t care.

My eyes started to glaze over as some people retweeted entire conversations.

A celebrity tweeted an entire darts game until my head exploded.

Others retweeted their own words over and over.

Some tweeted their blog updates on the hour.

Others had personal conversations with each other that showed up in my list for no reason at all.

And many tweeted their every step – between the kitchen and their laptop. And back.

My brain began to bleed as I realised that twitter is exactly what I originally hated about it.

A diatribe of the minutia of the jejune.

Now that’s not to say that every person I follow is broadcasting trite prattle, there are many people who I originally followed because I thought they were funny. And they still are. But I can no longer find their tweets in the incessant flood of mundanity.

So Twitter, I’ve decided that this relationship just isn’t working for me. I don’t want you in my bed anymore.

I hope we can still be friends.

——

It’s been written by many a more respected person that Twitter is a waste of time. And Twitter has been defended by many for different reasons as well. Maybe slightly dubious reasons.

Before I started using Twitter I’d declaimed it many times as pointless and narcissistic. Filled to the brim with marketeers and shameless self promotors. I said it was banal.

Aha, I can hear you now, my gentle readers – smugly laughing that I am merely another of those that I decryed. I’ve set my blog up to tweet when I make a new post. Yes, guilty as charged. And I’ve also tweeted about coffee. A lot. 

I tweeted like crazy before they took my gall bladder out. That was procrastination at its best.

Twitter is just another method of communication, and it will be as good as you make it. That’s one thing used in its defence.

But I don’t think I’ve ever rung my mother, or emailed my best friend to tell them that the person standing in the queue in front of me is going to get a slapping.

Is it really a good thing to allow people to bypass the self filtering feature that “time” gives? The time to rethink what it’s wise to say, and what is not. When you get back home, if something was really important, then you could post about it on an online forum, or blog about it. And if it wasn’t worth saying, you’d simply consign it to your mental trashcan where gradually it would be eaten away by the maggots of time, along with all the other trash you toss in from moment to moment.

Twitter takes the trashcan out of the equation for some people. Instead of tossing those thoughts, they immediately broadcast them.

Which reminds me of this video…

But it’s not only the banality of daily life that gets bounced around the twittersphere. Tragedies also more quickly from one timeline to another.

Recently Twitter was the centre of a controversy, when a mother tweeted that her child had fallen into the pool, and later tweeted that he’d died. Along with sympathy and condolences, she was targetted with accusations and blame – about her use of Twitter during a supposed time of grief.

As a communication tool, Twitter makes it very easy to quickly broadcast a message. And during such an awful time, a person has a lot of time of their hands. Time that they’d want to fill with distraction – anything to take their mind off the horrible reality. I can totally understand why someone would be using Twitter to broadcast at that time.

What isn’t quick about Twitter however, is the reading and catching up. The more people you follow, the more your feed fills up with fragmented snippets of conversation, one liners, isolated statements and ambiguous comments.

What I’d really like in Twitter is a funny-o-meter, to filter out the tweets that really don’t make the grade. Or a way to give star ratings to tweets that would accumulate, and give the tweeter an overall score. Then I could view only by score.

Oh, I know I can use lists for that. And lists are great. I have private lists where I can view only those that have interesting things to say. But first I have to make the list and decide who’s on it.

Really, to spend all this time trying to filter out the chaff and find the wheat is a waste of time.

Ergo, I may have proved my point.

Let me just go tweet it… (Oh Twitter, you know I just can’t stay away!)