45. Twitter quitter.

Tweet tweet
People invited me to join twitter. Strange people who hardly seemed like computer users, so I joined it. It seemed like nothing much. I posted “I drank a cup of coffee.” Useless, meaningless, silly.

Twitter seemed nice, cozy, among friends. You didn’t have to commit to a two-way relationship with people. You could choose to follow them and viceversa. But if both sides weren’t following each other, there was no communication. Which was mostly fine, often preferable. Still seemed mostly meaningless.

Not so sweet
But. Twitter was so simple, your audience so unnoticeable and ignore-able, it seemed really easy for people to just post things. Any things. Grouchy things. Annoying things. But what to do if someone felt free to just non-stop complain, or brag for that matter? You might choose to “unfollow” them. If they noticed you not following them, now there was a whole other level of having to deal with something.

The twitter communications often made people who you liked face to face, one on one, seem really annoying.

Artless
Oh and you wrote annoying things too. It was easy. Too easy. Noone could really comment. When things were going wrong at Walmart or in the McDonalds drivethru, guess what, tweet about it. There’s no art there. You just couldn’t be clever. Even when you thought you were clever, you looked back at it 5 minutes later. Ugh. That was dumb. Detweet. Erase.

Then next level. Celebrity friends posting their nude-y funsies. DUDE. I didn’t want to see that. Even if not following them, it ends up making its way to you. Ugh. Again, the non-computer users. Full circle. 3 years after my start with the coffee drinking post, this is where we are at.

Friendless
In the end I realized I no longer actually talked to my actual friends. Either the friendship seemed to have devolved into only following each other on twitter and rarely barely making a direct comment or the people were so annoying you didn’t want to see their faces in real life anyway.

Final tweet:
“I think social networking gives you the false impression you're still friends with people you are no longer friends with. Kinda sick.” Dumb tweet. As always.

Twitter social networking experiment 7/08-4/11.

-4/19/11