Thing #13: Twitter

Twitter, an online combination of social networking and Instant Messaging, is intriguing but a little repulsive to me. I'm not sure I care or need to know the trivial details of someones life, like if they're reading a magazine or eating spaghetti. There is a kind of voyeuristic appeal, that you can know personal things about someone that you probably wouldn't otherwise, but really, of what value is that type of information? And how do you know it's really true? A teen can say they are studying for a history test, while really they are engaged in other activities elsewhere.

I agreed with the article called "Is Twitter TOO good?" by Kathy Sierra. I think the constant multi-tasking required by Twittering or chatting is disruptive to workplace productivity and disrupts the concentration needed to be in a flow state of deep thought. As she points out, there is a feeling of social interaction that may not be real social interaction. We feel connected, but are we really isolated from real-life connections? And for those not using services like Twitter, there is a feeling of being left out and excluded. We already have to deal with information overload, and I'm afraid this could be one more cause of it.

Personality plays a large part in the appeal of Twitter. I am a private person who works best alone. I don't think the information I could gain from knowing minute details of a person's life would enhance our relationship. It might even cause disrespect if I could see they were wasting a lot of their time using things like this at work. They are aptly called persistent presence tools. I barely have time to keep up with my real life friends, let alone investing time and energy forming relationships with total strangers. An Internet contact with people I don't really know can't be a replacement for real live human relationships.

I did some searches for co-workers, our school, my church, but didn't find much.

I also read the article about some of the technical glitches that Twitter encounters, and when I went to sign up to follow msauers for the assignment, I got this error message: "Twitter is stressing out - feature temporarily disabled."