I Have Had Enough of Twitter

Tuesday Tutorials: It's Time We all just Stopped Caring for a Moment

Dateline: I Miss when Newspapers were Cool.

I fear that despite crusading against it, that I’m fighting a losing battle against an organism we’ve created, but can no longer control. Frankly, it’s scary how popular Twitter has gotten, and when compared to what the site actually offers, it’s tragic. If twitter becomes the new standard for online social media then we really are doomed in terms of human interaction. Now don’t get me wrong, I know people evolve socially and to this point, each advancement in communication has been great. The phone, the email, the IM, the text, and the wall post are all relevant, meaningful advancements that fostered at least some intelligent forms of communication. But we crossed the line and went too far with the Tweet, and we need to go back. Today’s tutorial is on how we get back before it’s too late.

First, let me explain the severity of the problem. Remember how cool Facebook was when it came out. Well Twitter is smashing Facebook in terms of popularity. According to the Neilsen NetView for internet ratings, in 1 year, Twitter saw a 1,374 percent jump in unique visitors between February 2008 and February this year, up to 7 million from only 475,000. By comparison, Facebook grew 228 percent, to 65.7 million users, during the same period. Mere peanuts. That’s all the evidence I need, it’s out of control.


People love twitter so much they are getting "fail-whale" (a popular image seen on the site) tattoos. ...on their bodies!
I thought facebook was pretty popular, but im sure even Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a damn tattoo.

In case you aren’t familiar, Twitter is essentially a glorified dedication to the concept of the AIM away message or the Facebook status. Each user can write out lil 140 character micro-blogs that offer a few sentences about what you’re doing and you can also add pics. The idea here is that the blog is supposed to updated on a whim, or literally anytime a user changes what they are doing. So last year, when the site started, office workers used it to let their friends know how their day was going or students logged on to keep in touch with friends while they were stuck in class w/o having send a text message. But when PR firms and marketing agencies saw Twitter’s potential to provide 24/7 publicity to their clients, all of a sudden every celebrity has to tweet. So now, Lance Armstrong tweets from the hospital after his collarbone surgery to tell us he feels fine, Charlie Villanueva tweets from the locker room at halftime of a Bucks game to tell us he needs to step it up in the 2nd half, and Mark Cuban tweets from his courtside seat to tell us that the refs are blowing the game for his Mavericks.

I know we have a quest for knowledge, and that humans, especially American ones want their news now, no matter what that news is. Case in point, 52 news papers around the U.S. are in the process of calling Peter Francis Geraci for those bankruptcy info tapes. But there comes a point where being curious turns into being nosey. And Twitter is the nosiest shit I have ever seen. Twitter has gained such wild popularity because it’s actively participated in by celebrities, from athletes like Shaq, to movie stars like Jennifer Aniston, to musicians like John Mayer, to politicians like various Reps. And Senators. If we truly care about what these people are “doing” at every waking moment, it implies that we don’t have any problems of our own to attend to. That bothers me, and it should bother us all because please believe, we ALL have plenty to worry about. If you don’t think it’s out of hand now, it will be. Pretty soon, twittering is going to descend the ladder of prominent people, and soon we will be saturated with tweets that we really don’t care about from people we really don’t want to hear from. Parents are going to tweet about their kid’s little league games, bus driver’s are going to tweet about their favorite routes, and our biggest fears will be realized when gangbangers tweet about taking the day off due to cold, rainy weather conditions.

So stop. Stop caring. If you don’t pay attention, it might go away. If we’re lucky. Either that, or I'm going to have to start Tweeting between innings from the dugout during softball games.