Just Wittering On

So, relatively recently I’ve tried to work out Twitter. I’m sure that makes me sound like an old man (“Ahh, someone’s just ‘tweeted’ on ‘the twitter’! What does that say…er…goodness, I can’t understand a word…”), but as a social medium it is nothing short of unfathomable.  It lacks the personal-ness that facebook can claim with its myriad privacy settings, chat options and questionnaires (everyone loves questionnaires) on your favourite books, films, sandwiches etc…  Twitter isn’t easy or practical to use for personal communication (or it shouldn’t be…you shouldn’t tell the whole world about what you’re doing tomorrow). It is telling that with Twitter you have followers, not friends, as that is basically what you do. You say shit. And sometimes somebody listens.  Sometimes somebody even says the same shit as you, and everyone feels all warm about it.

However, due to how short each tweet is (though lord knows, it’s a horrific word), it’s hard to say anything worthwhile.  It’s not like a blog, in which you can expand your ideas and justify them and to a degree make them valuable in their own right: It’s microblogging, so you have to cut out all the bits which make your point interesting. They’re left as just that, a point in the endless void of the internet.

And so! Everybody loves it.

So anyway, I’ve got twitter, guys.  @Igottheconch.

Follow me…(as the lion said to the naive lamb)

“List your favorite ways to procrastinate.” Er, ok…

It might not come as a shock to anyone visiting this site at this point, but I’m relatively new to the whole blogging thing.  Perhaps sensing this, the lovely people at WordPress decided to give me a prompt, a few in fact:
1)List your favorite ways to procrastinate.

2)Describe your earliest experience of death. How did you feel?

3) What topics do you like to debate?

It seems interesting that, with an internet already filled with so much meaningless bilge, Worpress feels a need to encourage people with no original ideas to write.  That said, I have used this as a jumping off point myself, in a way that is probably far less metatextual than I imagine, and in fact makes me look sneery and lazy. Which is bad.

Still, anyone who’s ever used facebook or twitter will know simply how boring people are. The most often repeated topic of any facebook status is how bored that person is, and to be frank, I’m not surprised. If when you’re bored your solution is to tell similarly bored people that you are bored then you will always be bored.  Twitter is similarly content-free. Lady Gaga (singer, self-publicist), the most followed person on twitter’s most recent tweet was “It’s always, and forever will be, about the work.” With no surrounding context. What does that even mean?!

I suppose it’s the democratic nature of the internet that means that everyone gets their say, but in the same vein, the sheer amount of such people doing just that means that no one gets their say, because we can’t filter out the crap.

And here I am, typing as if anyone reads this or cares about my opinion. In my own little comfortable bubble.