TODAY I registered a Twitter account. I had avoided it for as long as I could and was finally curious to see what all the hype was about. I quickly became a follower of Barbara Walters, CBS News, and a couple of friends, before proceeding back to my homepage to see what great things had begun. I had a few sentences, including Barbara Walters’s comment: “I am losing my twitter virginity.” Otherwise, I was very underwhelmed. The lack of punctuation in most posts was frustrating, and I didn’t really need to know both when a Somali hijacker was being transported and when he had arrived in New York to await trial. Twitter is a useless fad exploited by the media to seem like something exciting and innovative.
There are several reasons I haven’t been terribly impressed with the site besides the specific instances above. First off, Twitter is completely impersonal. Don’t get me wrong, sites like Myspace and Facebook have their level of impersonality as well, but at least you can call the people you associate with “friends” on those sites. On Twitter, you become a follower. Or a fan. I’m not really sure what the difference is. In either case, Twitter encourages high degrees of impersonal relationships by its very nature. As soon as you sign up, the site encourages you to “follow” celebrities and other people you don’t know. Even if you do know those who you follow on the site, the level of interactivity afforded is pathetic at best. There are options for personal messages, but the primary mode of communication on Twitter is to update with posts for all your followers to see. Communication becomes less about the relationship between two individuals and more about my reflections on my own life. Other people are passive observers of what’s happening to me.
Not only is the communication one-way, but it’s also extremely shallow. The character requirements encourage brief statements that are superficial, often just including what you are physically doing at any given time. There is no opportunity for reflection or analysis. It could be viewed as an efficient streamlining of important information, but only if any of the information people posted was important in the first place. Instead, Twitter takes a bare-bones approach to information I didn’t need to know in the first place.
More than any other site, Twitter seems to encourage obsessive use. Millions of Americans waste countless hours of each day in the office, checking for Twitter updates from those they are following. The triviality of each post just encourages others to do the same, pausing between every activity to update the world about their whereabouts and activities. A mere ten minutes after I created an account on the site, I was already being followed by someone I’d never heard of. Is there a way to stop her from following me? I’m not sure, and I don’t really care. The truth is, anything I bother to post on Twitter will be so meaningless that I’m not worried about a stranger having access to it.
Even with all these faults and limitations, Twitter might be able to benefit the society in some small way if it was nearly as popular as the media makes it out to be. News networks tout Twitter as a valuable tool for our society, political leaders and celebrities update on the site regularly, and Twitter has quickly become an everyday term in the American household. Maybe it’s part of an attempt for the media to embrace vibrant youthfulness, but they are quick to embrace a fad that isn’t actually a fad. Twitter might have garnered a fairly large online following, but it’s not by any means universally-accepted and much fewer people use it to effectively relay important information. Almost all other online trends take their root in youth, but the youngest generation of socially-active Americans is largely ignoring Twitter, wondering what all the hype the news media has created is actually about.
This article has done little besides condemning Twitter as useless, but there isn’t much constructive criticism to provide for the site. Twitter could add more features, but other sites like Myspace and Facebook already accomplish Twitter’s primary function while providing a myriad of other services available to the user. Twitter is simpler and more user-friendly, but at what cost? It’s easy to make a site user-friendly when there’s nothing on the site in the first place. While it’s harmless to take part in a trend just for the sake of trying it, it’s important to remember that more permanent and meaningful forms of communication will persist. Despite what the media would have you believe, Twitter’s just an easy gimmick to relay often-meaningless information.
Anthony Nobles column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.nobles@cavalierdaily.com.
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