Twitterpated
Especially since the recent SXSW conference there has been a constant discussion about the web application Twitter, which allows for mini-posts to be made from im, sms, or the browser itself [this post written before the app Twitterific]. The mini posts are called “tweets.” If you think to call a person posting a “twit” you wouldn’t be the first.
The conversation sounds something like this:
Flower: Well! What’s the matter with them?
Thumper: Why are they acting that way?
Friend Owl: Why, don’t you know? They’re twitterpated.
Flower, Bambi, Thumper: Twitterpated?
Friend Owl: Yes. Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime. For example: You’re walking along, minding your own business. You’re looking neither to the left, nor to the right, when all of a sudden you run smack into a pretty face. Woo-woo! You begin to get weak in the knees. Your head’s in a whirl. And then you feel light as a feather, and before you know it, you’re walking on air. And then you know what? You’re knocked for a loop, and you completely lose your head!
Thumper: Gosh, that’s awful.
Flower: Gee whiz.
Bambi: Terrible!
Friend Owl: And that ain’t all. It could happen to anyone, so you’d better be careful.
[points at Bambi]
Friend Owl: It could happen to you…
[points at Thumper]
Friend Owl: … or you, or even…
[Flower looks at Owl shyly]
Friend Owl: Yes, it could even happen to you!
Thumper: Well, it’s not gonna happen to me.
Bambi: Me neither.
Flower: Me neither.
Friend Owl: Same thing every spring. “Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet! Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet!” Love’s sweet song. Hm! Pain in the pinfeathers, I call it!
Specifically, conversations range from neat ways of using new technology, to wondering if twitter was a pretty new face or a pain in the pinfeathers, as it was being hyped/used/mocked everywhere you looked.
For me it has been like an RSS feed of statements by people that I’m interested in. My favorite twitter-er is a dog named Mister President, a real dog I’ve actually met.
Sometimes, knowing what my friends are feeling, or imagining a black labrador’s thoughts as he drifts to sleep in a hallway after his morning walk keeps me from feeling lonely or over-stressed at work, “ankle deep in the blood of fools.”
One friend just relocated to New York City and drove her own moving truck cross-country. It was fun to support her progress and cheer her arrival in Brooklyn. I can also follow the politician John Edwards (really him, they say) or Darth Vader (probably not him).
I’m waiting for someone to write as Darth Nader.
I’ve been posting tweets since relatively early on, but apparently everyone indeed gets twitterpated in the spring. I included my tweets in the sidebar of this blog for a brief moment. Ultimately I didn’t like the look of it in my current design, nor was I interested in mixing posts.
The thing is, most twitter-ers don’t follow the public timeline, he or she follows who they know or are interested in, just like in anything else. Last night a stranger in Shanghai added me as a friend, and I added him back. He asked “what twitter really mean?” in one of his first twitter posts. I’m interested in learning about this person. He’s not inviting 1,000 people to be his friend like a lot of silly people do, so that’s another thing I like about him. A girl likes to feel special, after all.
Passionate Users has an article called “The Asymptotic Twitter Curve” that goes well with the NYT article about how multitasking does not really improve productivity most of the time.
I’m starting to sense a trend here, a theme not just in what we create but for what we’re lately obsessed with talking about on these platforms we create (it’s all so meta). Not just a theme for the computers and computery apps sucking away our time and dividing our attention and lives into segments, but for the larger equation of choice, options, time, and a word I hate, management.
Management is counter flow and flow can easily take us away. If i go with the flow (simply following my desire) to follow links in the Passionate User’s article, to read more, and think more about this, then that goes away from the disciplined management of my time which includes checking email, writing responses, doing “actual” work, and minimizing this reading and writing in the “down” moments in my workflow. If checking Twitter and reading articles of true interest to me, and perhaps benefit to understanding myself, my industry, my world, then shouldn’t they be counted as belonging to the “up” moments into which I naturally flow, while the discipline I manage keeps the other balls in the air, while I work in forced motions.
I’ve thought about doing things with twitter, as people tend to do. I’d like to make a twitter entity that is purely anonymous wishes, just like the internet-famous postsecret was all confessions. Or the permanent question “What are you doing?” can be interpreted in as many ways as there are people, and elicit an ongoing response, like the drone and push of a prayer wheel.
That would be beautiful.
I think our distractions can tell us a lot about what we want, who we think we are, and what we are trying to do.
But the stream of twitter’s main feed does not always tell us these things clearly, and I suspect that as the sound of the environment changes, so will my affection for it. Will I be able to give up using it by then? Is it already too late for me? Given my latest posts, I suspect it is. Consider me twitterpated, along with the rest of them.
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