Taking a break from my web empire I found this interesting article today regarding Twitter:
Why You Should be On Twitter - by Chuck Tryon
As new communication technologies emerge, it is not uncommon to see articles or essays bemoaning how the new technology will destroy or damage communication as we know it, that a tool will lead to illiteracy, narcissism or whatever social ill might be haunting society at any given time.
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This is one of those technologies where I am on the outside looking in. I mean, I share a cell phone with my husband, and it's about fifteen years old. It's black with a little antenna that goes up and down. A friend of ours joked that he has seen that model on eBay for $500 (as in, it's an ancient artifact). I feel very much like the writer who disdains computers for their Remington typewriter. So I am not too familiar with Twitter, other than the premise - you can send 140-character messages to your fellow followers and update them on your life, and carry on a conversation in tweets.
As a poet, I feel drawn to a technology where the writer is forced to whittle down language to its bare essence. And yet, how much time is there in a day? My friend, Zeke, joked the other day that "Patty has like, what, eight websites?" Everybody in the room laughed, but when I mentally counted, I realized it's actually eleven. Do I need yet another? With two Myspace pages, a Facebook page, three blogs (two for me and one for my husband), Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, not to mention our two actual business sites, well, the math is undebatable - eleven websites.
Have I become a computer droid? Is my butt expanding from all these hours in a chair at a keyboard and monitor? What is going on here? Do I really need to now engage in Twitter? Or would that be the straw that breaks the camel's back, the drop of water that causes the bucket to overflow?
What do you think? Seriously, is Twitter all that?
Jon Stewart had his take on it....
In a segment called "Old Man Stewart Shakes His Fist At [Twitter]" Jon explored the world of tweeting last night with help from Samantha Bee, who is not only on Twitter, but Grunter and Stalker as well.
Stewart raised concerns that this trend further frays our already small attention spans, and admitted that he "has no f**king idea how Twitter works or why it is." But Bee assured him "it's awesome."
She went on to explain that it offers insight into our most important news makers' least important thoughts and that young people love it according to old people.
See the clip: The Daily Show's Jon Stewart Takes on Twitter