This comic is hilarious. It’s also entirely wrong.
No no. I really do get it. No one cares about your dog, your girlfriend’s favorite muffin, or which character you slept with in Mass Effect 2. I understand that that’s INCREDIBLY banal information. It’s boring and mundane and no single piece is useful in, really, any way.
But see, that’s the point. Twitter is not a blog. It has a 140 character limit. You -can’t- hash over the mysteries of the universe in that space. So can we all stop pretending like we expect to? Twitter is a social networking tool. It’s a nice way to announce things. It’s a better way to smirk and share experience. It’s not a journal.
Twitter is useful because it’s ubiquitous. It interacts with a device almost all of us always have on us– the cell phone. Because Twitter will “push” tweets to your phone, it becomes part of everyday ritual. You (ideally, though not always) check Twitter as often as you check your texts. It’s a passive system instead of an active one (that is, Twitter “pushes” the data to you on a mobile device, but reading your friends’ blogs requires you to click on a link or an RSS feed, thus “pulling” the information down). Twitter doesn’t require a smart phone– it can work with SMS, which almost any phone created in the last ten years can handle. It is a low-overhead, low-time-investment social medium.
What this means is that anyone who wants to can tweet. It means that, yes, ppl who tlk lk dis c4n snd u txts lik all t3h tym. But more importantly, it means that people can send you texts all the time. It would be really weird if some of my best friends from college sent me texts about, say, the snow storm in DC or how they’re late for the train. But because they tweet it, it’s an update to the internet– I’ve chosen, through my settings, to receive that tweet. As time goes on, and more of the mundane updates get sent to me, I get a fuller picture of the lives my friends lead. I get what I’ve deemed “roommate info.”
Roommate info, here, is defined as the knowledge of events and activities usually deemed un-noteworthy. These are the kinds of things that usually go observed, not remarked. Literally, then, roommate info is unremarkable information. Usually the kind of thing reserved for significant others and, well, roommates. For friends you see often, Twitter serves as only a minor convenience: you have a close enough understanding of their everyday life that their tweets are, at best, a little forewarning of their current mood. For friends who are more distant, or people you simply don’t see very often, Twitter gives a casual, friendly peek into their lives. Is knowing that some guy you met at a convention has a cold going to let you form a deep, lasting connection? Probably not. The next time you see him at a convention, though, a year or more of tweets will ease the transition from “oh, hey! I know you. What’s been up?” to “Congrats on the new job!”
Twitter doesn’t create anything. Not friendships or connections or business deals. It does, however enable such things. It helps establish a casual platform for interaction–not intimate, but cordial. Tweeting is a way of humanizing our compartmentalized relationships online. It’s no replacement for face to face interaction, but it’s a great augmentation.
So keep tweeting about your boring-ass lives. Keep telling us what you had for dinner and who you saw at the gym. Is your cat doing the most ADORABLE THING RIGHT NOW? Tweet it. Include a picture. Next time I buy you a beer, I’ll at least know what to ask about.
Genghis Philip
Gordon Levine
