T’was a Time Before Twitter…
March 9, 2009 by Julia King · 5 Comments
Twitter is like lip piercings or a thong peeking out of a pair of jeans. It makes me feel old-fashioned, like I should be making meatloaf and wearing a house coat (not a Snuggie, but a house coat — the kind my grandmother used to wear with little buttons to keep it closed).
“Even I know that Twitter is weird,” writes a blogger who Twitters. That’s encouraging, because we all do things we know are weird (for instance, I sometimes watch America’s Next Top Model). Normalcy (if there is such a thing) requires that we at least know when we’re being weird (as in, “I know it’s weird, but I have to stand on my hands every time I see a cow”).
The fact is, it’s all strange: blogging, Facebook, MySpace, texting, tweeting, tooting (I made that last one up, but it’ll happen).
If computers have made bad writing too easy (and they totally, really, completely have), applications like Twitter have made co-dependence too easy. No one should know what someone else is doing at all times (as in, Julia is shaving her ankles and clipping her toenails for spring!). Personal information sharing is fine, but if the group of people who get to hear it ALL can’t fit into a minivan, it’s too big.
Togetherness. Community. Right on. We are the world. We are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving (that’s a song from the olden days, when we talked to each other with our voices). But surely there are limits (please let there be limits!) to the healthy exchange of information between people. And when I say between “people,” I mean between Person A and Persons B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, and so forth. Small numbers of people are designed for genuine friendship and daily minutia. Big numbers are made for traffic jams and riots and Publisher’s Clearing House.
“It keeps me connected to people,” is the prevailing claim from those who routinely use an array of technologies to communicate with people out of view while people in view wait for a turn to “connect.” It’s as though we’re all Paris Hilton, distractingly popular and struggling to dole out small (and not so small) servings of ourselves to satisfy our many admirers.
It’s easy to get sucked into the frenzy, to “friend” everyone and her sister, to live each day (each hour?) with a new one-liner for the world, to upload cute profile pictures and clever homemade videos. Actually, that’s not true. It’s hard!
