Friday, April 03, 2009

The Trouble With Twitter

I do not understand our cultural fascination with Twitter. It's essentially Facebook without all the other tools/apps/features. I have tried Twitter and think it basically a worthless pursuit at this point. With Twitter, you can leave brief thoughts/sentences to let people how are following you know what you are up to and what you are thinking. (I believe that's called a "status update" in facebook-land.) I know some people who follow certain people religiously on Twitter because they are quasi-celebrity or something. The problem with this, is that you get all sorts of useless thoughts from people who use Twitter on their phone. Like

-I'm stuck in traffic.
-Just went to the bathroom...don't remember eating that.
-Considering what I should do right now.
-I just updated my twitter
-I like yellow snow
-On the subway...the guy besides me smells

When it gets down to it, we've allowed Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to replace real, meaningful relationships. Take my Facebook account...I have 466 friends. But I am guessing that out of those 466 "friends" that I personally relate to about 10-15 on a regular basis. We live in our society that feels less and less connected relationally, even as we have more communication tools than ever at our fingertips. Real relationships take more than a wall comment, twitter update, or a text message. They must be balance with real human interaction.

I saw this video about Twitter the other day and thought it was right on.



So whether you Twitt or Tweet, reach out and touch someone today with a meaningful conversation, or just a phone call to say hello. Now I've got to go and change my status update.

4 comments:

Matt Ralph said...

Preach it!

Unknown said...

yay for the fail whale!

I never understood Twitter...apparently it's for twits....sheesh!

Steven Wiseman said...

Hmm... so why keep a Facebook account?

Steve and Andrea LaMotte said...

In reply to Steve...first the post is mostly regarding Twitter and why I feel Twitter is (for the most part) useless. Sure, there are some uses for it, but most of them are trivial and you can accomplish the same thing (only better) through other means.

Secondly, I said that in our disconnected world, we need to be more intentional about connecting some way other than electronically. Facebook is great for keeping in touch...but we need to balance that with phone calls and face to face conversations.