I tested twitter this past weekend in SF. Having been staunchly against using it, and without any of my friends using it, there never seemed to be the need to use it.
But since I love to test things out, I decided to give it a whirl.
In short, I still don’t care for it.
Why? Using Twitter, shooting short notes into the void, detracts from just enjoying the moment, from enjoying the face-to-face interaction, to enjoying the world in front of your eyes. Why do we feel the need to always connect to the network? Can we exist offline anymore? Am I just hopelessly out-of-touch? Is this just the first step towards being a full-fledged Luddite and moving to a commune?
(Respectively, intermittent variable positive reinforcement, addiction and narcissicm, yes, probably, doubtful.)
Perhaps my negative viewpoint is caused by the low utility the service offers to me: since none of my friends use it, I only contribute to the cacophony of ideas chucked into the void, without getting any feedback.
But my main contention to using Twitter is that it detracts from being social. Instead of just enjoying it in the moment, we are thinking of what we saw and how we can interpret it in a 140-character note. By constantly sharing little thoughts with others, we are taken out of the moment, and fail to piece together these micro-chunks of thought into cohesive, weighty ruminations that span multiple experiences. A bit of our mind is thinking about the void, and less of it is focusing on the moment, the people in front of us, and it just shows a bit of disrespect to who we are with to be distracted by the void.
Granted, I accept that used in the right way it can be an effective way to communicate. And I know I’m far from perfect in my own social use of the new tools. But technology is changing the way we converse, share, even think, and not all for the better. Only by working to understand how it is changing how we interact can we truly leverage the new potential. I still have hope. We’re still in the beginning.
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On a separate note, perhaps the most interesting article I have read lately is from The New Atlantis about the cultural impact of virtual social networks. Definitely worth the read and some reflective thought.
