It's been a month and a half on Twitter, the unwashed phenomenon, and it still feels like making passes at the indifferent woman on the other end of the bar counter. She isn't doing anything for me, or is she?
It's been a month and a half on Twitter, the unwashed phenomenon, and it still feels like making passes at the indifferent woman on the other end of the bar counter. She isn't doing anything for me, or is she?
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I haven't been on a Facebook, Orkut or a LinkedIn. Twitter has been my first social networking experience. I read a riveting Time magazine article by Steven Johnson on how 140-character posts were changing the way people met people. Temptation of experience is a glib seller. I joined up. It has so far been a disappointment.
Diarrheic tweets of fellow users bore me (some of them post every 30 seconds). It is a great source of breaking news, and that annoys me -- it breaks the horn of the unicorn and makes Twitter a horse of utility, killing the romance of it being a supposedly spontaneous, worldwide, social movement. And then there is the bar-counter problem: a total lack of discreetness, grim barriers on stealth. Subtlety risks being caught under headlights every time it tiptoes out of the keyboard.
Every move is a broadcast: announcement of one's chosen breakfast cereal, bolshie views about books and relationships, mini sports updates, promo of one's recipe or TV show, a string of clever nothings. Clever nothings, incidentally, have emerged as the worst perpetrators of electronic snobbery. Example: "Just bought a gun. Today I am going to shoot the breeze." (Do us a favour, shoot your effing brains out of your effing ears.). Essentially we are copywriting. Tweets are ads we put out about ourselves.
Maybe that's where lies the mystery of Twitter's staggering popularity. Follower, following...nice, feel-good bipolarity...15 minutes of fame in a million, tiny, heady doses...alone, anonymous no more. Well, on that premise, Twitter begins to make sense. Use it if you have something (or nothing, but what the hell) to beam. It is a workhorse: it'll work if you want to promote your piece, organisation or political view; or if you simply want attention.
If you want to know somebody else, Twitter is not the place. And it is not about electronic interactions. E-mail or text messages or even public chat rooms achieve far more nuance and honesty probably because they don't put you tantalisingly on a world stage with Obama, Paris Hilton and Kevin Spacey. They don't make you so self-conscious, or take yourself so seriously.
But I still haven't given up on Twitter. One, because it is handy for a journalist to have an extra broadcast tool. Two, based on my initial disappointment, I don't want to infer that I understand Twitter. It may yet have charming, enigmatic places unknown to me. Just that the first four alphabets of this revolution don't inspire much confidence.
(The writer is the Executive Editor, MiD DAY)
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Email: abhijit.majumder@mid-day.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/abhijitmajumder
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