Twitter

Update, Dec. 2009: I wrote this a long time ago. I have not hated Twitter for quite a long time and have since started using it.

There's no way to write these things without sounding like a rousing curmudgeon, especially on all things technology. A lot of things annoy me at first that I end up using or liking. Grand examples include camera phones and MySpace/Facebook.

Anyway, one of my guiltiest pleasures is monitoring/voyeuring people I know on Facebook. I have over 180 friends on the service, the vast majority to whom I haven't spoken in many years. However, it is wildly fun to see that an ex-junior high school classmate is now married and working in amateur theater.

It is, of course, also oddly satisfying to find an ex-crush has gained lots of weight. I understand I've also become chubby, but schaedenfreude is schaedenfreude.

Anyway, the voyeurism inherent in Facebook is all good and well, but problematic is the status message. Most people use it as it is intended, to alert friends about actual status and current activity.

This, of course, is ridiculous. And Twitter is an extension of this.

There are two things at work here: The constant connectedness of our 21st-century lives and the Internet as a repository of everything in creation.

I am not necessarily against either idea. I would be the world's biggest hypocrite were I to complain about stupid shit posted on the Web; this blog is based entirely on the idea that I want someplace to complain. People can read it or not, which is fine. The Web is largely a repository for everything, be it stupid, offensive or brilliant.

Similarly, I own a cell phone -- I have a friend who doesn't and he is difficult to get a hold of. Indeed, my cell phone receives e-mail and the Web, so I am constantly connected to my electronic self.

The problem with Twitter is that its very existence gives people the ability to constantly update the world on their status. Instead of a daily "I am in place X," Twitter gives people the ability to constantly update every minute feeling/detail/bad idea/cheesy joke that pops into someone's head.

This, of course, is preposterous. The proliferation of blogs and the millions of Web sites on the Internet makes for a robust marketplace of ideas. A good, undiscovered writer can write about whatever s/he wants on the Web. Before the Web, this was not possible.

But there is no marketplace of ideas that Twitter satisfies or populates. Rather, it's simply an extension of the voyeurism inherent in status updates on a larger scale. There is no real worthwhile organization on Twitter and there is no real way to navigate the site. It is, for the most part, a clusterfuck of people Tweeting into the void.