Are You A Twit...?

I love the word Twitter, don't you? It sounds like something old Aunt Agatha would say when she's had one too many glasses of sherry.

"Ohhh, I feel all a-twitter..."

It's a silly word, and it really does describe the practice of tweeting. On Twitter.

I have to admit, I have a Twitter account.  I have used it once.  It just seems silly to me ~~ almost like a form of Tourette's syndrome, where people are shouting out strange utterances, but they're doing it on line.

"I'm drinking a cup of coffee!"

"I'm driving to Spuzzum to visit my cousin Betty-Lou!"

"I'm out of toilet paper!"

Omigawd, how did we survive without announcing our every waking thought and action?

In 2009 an American research company analyzed Twitters' tweets, with the following results:

Pointless babble – 40%
Conversational – 38%
Pass-along value – 9%
Self-promotion – 6%
Spam – 4%
News – 4%

From what I have read of Twitter posts, it's more like 90% pointless babble.  It's a very strange phenomenon that this is how the human race has been reduced to communicate.  As of 2011, 200 million users were generating over 200 million tweets per day. What I want to know is, what the h*ll are they all saying?  When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.

Twitter messages are completely open to anyone in the public who wants to log on and read the *tweets* written by *twits*.  And some of it is ... well ... very personal.  If someone has, say, 400 followers, whatever that person tweets broadcasts out to those 400 people and their followers too.  We share our deepest, darkest secrets with "friends" and often we don't know their real names or where they live.  We know them only by their monikers and their avatars, and yet somehow we trust them ~  and 400 of their closest "friends" ~~ with our confidences.  Where did this come from, this need to be hooked in with so many people from all over the globe ~~ people who are, to all intents and purposes, complete strangers to us?

A friend of mine was quite a philosopher, and he believed that it was just possible that mankind was simply a collection of bits inside a giant computer. His philosophy pre-dated the Matrix movies, but had much the same idea. He felt we are plugged into something much bigger than we are, and we are just imagining our existance. He surmised that we are the components that go into making a separate entity, and that the entity needs us, much as our bodies need cells. We were the cells in the entity.  It made for interesting discussions, but the more I think about how we are all so closely connected by computers, the more I am beginning to realize my friend's theory may not have been all that unusual.

My Twitter account will stay disabled, mostly because I find the whole premise of it just slightly creepy.  Do I really want to know Demi Moore's private thoughts about Ashton Kutcher?  Or that Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber have the most followers?  Or that the vapid Kim Kardashian has almost as many followers as the President of the United States?  Do I really care about these people?

No.  I guess I'm a twit...