Why I Hate Twitter

Or ‘Wil Wheaton eats a grilled cheese sandwich’.

Don’t get me wrong I am all in favour of the com­mu­nic­a­tions revolu­tion brought about by the inter­net. Were it not for said com­mu­nic­a­tions revolu­tion my life would be a lot a different.

I did, for instance, meet my part­ner and co-founder of SPK through the inter­net as well as many other people who I con­sider to be friends and acquaintances.

I can, it’s true, find out what’s going on almost any­where on the planet in less time than it takes me to make a cof­fee and a piece of toast in the morning.

I have, with some restric­tions, access to any form of media I can get my grubby little hands on at the press of a button.

I think the inter­net and the level of inter con­nectiv­ity between oth­er­wise unre­lated people is fuck­ing awesome.

So def­in­itely don’t get me wrong when I say that I hate Twit­ter.

I’m not some sort of anti-internet pur­itan. I don’t think it’s cor­rupt­ing our chil­dren and lead­ing to the down­fall of soci­ety. I have no wish to see it reg­u­lated by gov­ern­ments and stomped all over by Lars Ulrich and the copy­right police.

It’s just that I think some people are going a little too far and that they are doing so on Twit­ter and the other myriad social net­work­ing sites and applic­a­tions avail­able to every­one and their dog.

Months ago I deleted my Myspace pro­file. And then shortly after­ward I deleted my pro­file from bebo. I just couldn’t take it any­more and it was time to get out.

Spe­cific­ally what I couldn’t take any­more was the glit­ter text and obnox­ious music that assaul­ted me every time I looked at someone else’s pro­file. I couldn’t stand to see any­more badly taken nude pho­to­graphs of people I knew. It was becom­ing too dif­fi­cult to ignore the needy, atten­tion grabbing status mes­sages that told me every little thing about every sod­ding break up or argu­ment going on in the world out­side my house.

It was too much inform­a­tion. I really didn’t feel like I needed to know about these things. In fact I felt that naked pic­tures, per­sonal prob­lems and shared com­munity bitch­ing were per­haps best kept private and far the hell away from me, the unin­volved third party.

Now. It may be that I’m just middle aged before my time. It could be that I’m prudish and over­sens­it­ive. I may just be boring.

It could, and I do not deny this, be all of these things.

Maybe I just don’t get the inter­net anymore.

And so I retreated to Face­book where there was no glit­ter text and I kept the num­ber of con­tacts on my friends page to under 20 — just the way I liked it. Just the people I wanted to know about and the abil­ity to fil­ter out any­thing I didn’t care to read.

But then Super­pos­i­tionKitty went live and someone had to man the Twit­ter feed.

It had sat, largely unused and lonely, at the bot­tom of the page for months and I, entirely fool­ishly, assumed that this was because Ryan was busy cod­ing and design­ing and had no time to update it. So like the good busi­ness part­ner and girl­friend I am I offered to take over Twit­ter duties and skipped off to install a cli­ent I could use to do this, even­tu­ally set­tling on the Fire­fox exten­sion Twit­ter­Fox. After all social net­work­ing tools are per­fect for spread­ing the news about a new web­site hungry for views. How could I refuse an oppor­tun­ity to get in on what sev­eral news sites and blogs told me was the place to be in 2009?

For the first few days it stayed there in the corner of my browser, a tiny blue ‘t’ that could be eas­ily ignored while I messed around try­ing to get the hang of Twit­ter­ing. I entered a few updates. I had a look at some other people’s pages. I half­heartedly filled in our pro­file and thought about adding some kind of pic­ture for our avatar.

Essen­tially I stood a few steps back and poked at Twit­ter like a child at the sea side har­ass­ing a crab with a stick. And to all intents and pur­poses the crab did not poke back. Great! I thought, time to dive right in! The water in this rock pool looks amazing!

And so I did. A week into my Twit­ter exper­i­ment I star­ted to fol­low people. Not many at first. Only ten or eleven. But that was enough to teach me that just because a crab doesn’t move for a while that doesn’t mean it wont pin­cer your ass the first time you’re not look­ing and then call in it’s many many friends to do the same thing.

Suf­fice to say the water was not amaz­ing. The water was in fact very far from amazing.

Twit­ter­Fox has gone from a benign lower case let­ter to a soon to be unin­stalled irrit­at­ing blue box that popped up every fives minutes to inform me of a series of grow­ing inan­it­ies. Twit­ter itself, as I found out over the course of one after­noon, was a place filled with the bor­der­line hys­ter­ical who insisted that I knew everything that they were doing at every hour of the day. It’s not so much a social net­work­ing tool as it is a plat­form to stand on and demand that every­one be your audi­ence and per­sonal Greek chorus. “Val­id­ate the way I spend my time!” the Twit­terer shrieks and the chorus rushes in to do just that. It is as close to mass hys­teria as I desire to get.

Now again, don’t get me wrong. There are some people out there who use twit­ter to good effect. People who do things that are inter­est­ing and man­age to tread the fine line between being inform­at­ive and offer­ing far too much per­sonal inform­a­tion. It’s just that their voices are lost amid the myriad wail­ing of the Twit­ter atten­tion whore.

But how exactly do you go about sort­ing out the unbear­able white noise for the genu­ine and use­ful con­tent? Why do people insist on pol­lut­ing the air around them with the stinky cologne of des­per­a­tion like the next door neigh­bour whose music per­meates your home at 3am? How is it pos­sible to become so invas­ive in only 140 char­ac­ters or less?

I sup­pose, in fair­ness, that it was naive of me to expect it to have been dif­fer­ent than it was. Like I stated earlier in this art­icle I had already for­saken just about every other net­work­ing site because of abuse by people who really need you to know about their lives. I should have known bet­ter than to think Twit­ter would be free of this prob­lem. But that’s the prob­lem with hype — you may know that deep down some­thing is a ter­rible idea but if people tell you over and over again how good it is a part of you will really want to take a look. Curi­os­ity killed the cat and all that.

More fool me for fall­ing for it again des­pite my reser­va­tions. Hope­fully this time I’ll learn and in future stay away from the next big thing.

So what have I learned from Twitter?

I’ve learned that it’s use­ful. I’ve had to agree that it’s a fant­astic innov­a­tion. And yes it def­in­itely helps all kinds of people from all across the globe keep in con­tact and up to date with world events.

I’ve also learned that maybe all of these things are not as fant­astic as they may appear to be. I now know that Wil Wheaton enjoys grilled cheese sand­wiches and that some dude who I have never heard of who Ryan added to our fol­low­ing cat­egory doesn’t sleep well at night and has a son who tries to stick forks into elec­trical out­lets. I now know I can find out exactly what people I will never meet are hav­ing for din­ner 2 con­tin­ents away.

I’ve learned, I think, that any tool can only per­form as well as the per­son who uses it which has been my prob­lem with the social net­work­ing phe­nomenon all along. When some­thing is avail­able to every­one there is no way to ensure that every­one has some­thing inter­est­ing to say and the only per­son respons­ible for the value of the mes­sages is the indi­vidual hit­ting the send button.

The SPK Twit­ter will remain, mostly aban­doned and for­lorn at the the bot­tom of our site. It is after all some­thing that could come in handy from time to time. Just don’t expect any great rev­el­a­tions about our choice of grilled sand­wich or what I hap­pen to be wear­ing on any given Tues­day. I just don’t think that’s what it’s for.