“An Unholy Symphony”
I remember when I joined twitter…it was January 17th, 2008 and I was sitting at my desk at a prominent media company in midtown Manhattan when I told one of the head partners about this new thing I’d just joined. “That’s fucking pointless!” he declared after hearing my explanation of it…
It seemed like he might be right and I left my twitter neglected for awhile, until - as a couple of friend/followers joined in - I posted a generic placeholder plug for this website that stayed that way for a long while…
And I watched…as The_Real_Shaq picked up speed, and the Kutcher phenommenon, and then Oprah…and more and more e-mails trickled in of people following my account, and I saw other writers/comics get on board and I still thought it was all a little bit much…
So after the Dan Chaon incident earlier this week I logged back in, checked it out, gave it a shot…and had a fucking blast I must say…
The thing is, until you have friends or at least people you’re interested in following on there it does seem rather pointless, I guess. And every motherfucker on there tries to seem “cool” and selective in who they’re following - as, of course, I did… but I think that attitude is the wrong one to take if you want to get the most out of it… The twitter home following update page is an unholy symphony… it’s probably the most fucking democratic thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life. It’s the key to the whole movement - before I would just go to twitter pages of people I was interested in and catch up in one dose, but that’s totally missing the way you’re supposed to be seeing the updates… the less people you follow, the less info’s coming in there, the less fun it would seem to me… it trickles in in an addictive and insane tweetstream that would, well…
At it’s core, twitter is about sublime equality. Equality of post length - 140 characters, doesn’t matter who you are. Equality of membership. I’m @tonybock. Shaquille O’Neal is @The_Real_Shaq. We can communicate if we so choose. That’s pretty fucking cool.
I can definitely understand the addictiveness of the whole thing. I never did MySpace or facebook so I’m also getting the first joys of the social networking aspect through here that everyone else on the planet already knows about.
Also, in all honesty the past few days I’ve found my interest in reading blogs or news/opinion sites significantly sapped… I just didn’t have the attention span! For real. I hope that passes. Really. And it does seem like the twitter experience could get old and might be evil/bad for me and while I don’t love the scorekeeping/faux-coolness aspect of the prominence of the follower/following count, that is a key part of the whole thing.
I think you “do” twitter. It’s more like a drug experience. I login now with all the excitement and trepidation of pulling a chair up to the tables in Atlantic City… I’m locked in on there…
And, yes, it may just be the end of civilization…
