On The Use of Twitter:

On April 1, 2009, I joined Twitter. I didn’t understand it nor use it at first. It seemed like a streamlined facebook status update system, and succeeded mainly in just annoying me. When I started using the txt-service, which Twitter assures me would help me reach my full tweet potential, I hated the incessant stream of “Time for a haircut, lol!” and “I don’t know what I want for dinner :/” it sent out. For a while I just turned it all off, and let Twitter fester by itself.

The fact that I would get the ‘fail whale’ every time I went on Twitter’s actual website also didn’t help endear it to me. For the first couple months, I didn’t use Twitter on a matter of principle. What principle, I don’t know – but, dammit, I was proving a point, and it mattered.

I used an argument I had read somewhere to justify my actions: These social networking sites were creating a narcissistic bubble around their users, enabling people to create a ‘sphere of fame’ among their friends and followers that could only lead to even more self-absorption. For proof, see Perez Hilton. By not using my Twitter, I was rebelling against the man. I think. That fact that I maintained my web presence on several other sites didn’t bother me at all, because they were different – they weren’t Twitter. That was an important distinction, in my mind.

Why, I don’t know. It was silly to be making such arbitrary lines in the sand, and these were truly arbitrary. The only reason I shied away from Twitter was because I had no clue what it was about, how to use it, or why I disliked it. So, out of curiosity and disdain of my own ignorance, I started experimenting a bit, messing with the settings, and making my Twitter better reflect what I wanted out of it.

Having used it for 9 months now, to what I would call moderate success, I have learned to use and even enjoy Twitter. It might be a playground of narcissism, but it’s now one that I can wallow in too. I have found uses for it – when bumbling around the internet, Twitter is an invaluable guide for me of what my friends have come across and enjoyed (or been completely freaked out by). When I need something quickly, I can put out an immediate want ad. And when there’s an awkward moment in public and I need an excuse to check my text messages to avoid acknowledging it – Twitter.

So what has my time with Twitter taught me? Um … I really can’t say. I still have no clue what it’s for and why people like it. And every now and then it still annoys the crap out of me. It’s a poor conclusion to draw from one of society’s greatest social experiments to date, but it’s all I’ve got so far. We’ll see what revelations I glean from the next 9 months.

Oh, and let me know if you linked here from my Twitter – it’ll help me justify my web presence, and thus my existence.