A couple weeks back, Heather and I were shopping at the Wrentham Outlets. I opened the door of a dressing room to get her opinion, and she looked at the pants, grimaced, and said, “I don’t love the wash on those.” Which is fine, except that I was trying on a shirt. But it was enlightening to learn that Heather hates my favorite pair of jeans.
That little anecdote is 345 characters long. Which means that it’s 205 characters longer than the maximum length of a Twitter message. If you’re one of those technophobes who doesn’t Twitter, allow me to explain how this awesome new technology works: You type a message—a very short message—and it goes out to people who sign up to follow your updates. Your updates, or “Tweets,” can also be sent as text messages. According to the Twitter site, “Real life happens between blog posts and e-mails. And now, there’s a way to share.”
You mean, there’s a way to share besides texting and instant messenger and Facebook and Skype and the phone? To paraphrase Jay-Z, I’ve got 99 problems, but telling people what I ate for breakfast ain’t one.
Since I can’t seem to grasp the point of Twitter, I asked my Facebook friends if they use it, and why. The overwhelming response amongst Twitterers is, “I use it for business to keep in touch with clients.” Reading between the lines, then, Twits are Tweeting not because this is a super-useful new system, but because they don’t want to be perceived as technologically backward. Well, I hate to break it to you, but if you just want to act hip to what the kids are doing, you shouldn’t be Tweeting. You should be Sexting.
If I’m confused over the point of Twitter, at least Twitter is, too. By way of explaining its purpose, the Twitter site proclaims, “Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.” Yet Twitter also asserts that it “puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.”
If those two statements seem entirely at odds, they’re not. I’ll explain. Imagine you’re in a meeting and your phone buzzes. You’ve got a text message. You open it to find a Tweet from me. The news hits you like a runaway Mack truck: I’m eating soup. This changes everything. You punch your boss in the face and move to Montana to hunt bison and live in a cabin with no phone or Internet access. Voila—the antidote to information overload.
The fact that Twitter even exists says a lot about the contemporary penchant for naval-gazing. Once upon a time, shared information was by default important information, because it was prohibitively expensive to hire a town crier to inform everyone that you wonder why men have nipples. Technology improved, but still, the transfer of information had an underlying point: Sally has dysentery. Stop. Send britches. Stop.
The problem with Twitter (and the conceptually identical Facebook status update) is that many people have no filter on their information sharing. The people who update their status 15 times a day apparently lack the capacity to assume a detached view of their actions—if it’s important to them, it must be important to everyone. I rarely update my Facebook status, because of this simple rationale: either I’m doing something boring, so it’s presumptuous that anyone would care, or I’m doing something awesome, in which case it sounds like I’m bragging and being a douchebag. My friend Kerry has great status updates because, as a rule, they’re never about what he’s actually doing. For instance, he recently posted, “I think Bread was the worst group named after a food … Wild Cherry the best one-hit wonder named after food … and Meatloaf the best drunken sing-along artist named after food.”
Absurdly, even that nugget of an observation is too long for a Tweet. Twitter allows room for the “what” at the expense of the “why,” which results in an unusual fusion of succinctness and banality. If Raymond Carver were still alive, he’d definitely have mixed feelings about Twitter.
But nobody wants to miss out on a cultural phenomenon, no matter how stupid, as evidenced by the popularity of the Slanket. Slankets, however, at least keep you warm. Twitter is so asinine and cynical that I half suspect it’s the subject of a gentleman’s wager between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. “I bet you, sir, that you cannot get a million people to embrace a platform that is inferior to a simple e-mail and encourages the bored and uninteresting to share their every thought.” Various estimates put the number of Twitter users around a million already, so I expect to see Bill Gates with a mohawk any day now.
In the meantime, I think I’ll continue to sit this one out. I’m too busy to Twitter. I’ve got soup to eat, people to sext.