Everyone, it seems, has a Twitter piece these days. Here’s mine.
When it comes to gadgety gadgets and technological thingnabobs, I am officially the last person to get on board with it. I tell you, you know a trend is completely and absolutely over when I absorb it.
It’s true. I didn’t get a cell phone until 2002 (gasp), I turned off the txt messaging feature earlier this year (too many unsigned texts from friends saying ‘how r u?” to which I replied: “who are you?” as well as too many spam texts that I’m assuming I pay for) and even before that, I was still buying cassette tapes until they pulled the last ones off the shelves in oh about what, maybe 1999? I’ve just about pulled it together to rebuy my old VHS onto DVDs and refuse to buy BluRay because I just know that by the time I spend another bunch of money on all my favorite movies and tv shows, there’ll be some new format that I’ll have to adapt to. Again.
The tide turned for my trend setting self two years ago (2007) when a friend from Chicago who lives and breathes The Apple Store convinced me to put away the “discman” (I know!) and buy an iPod. I resisted. I fussed. I fumed.
But the Shuffle was only $70 and I relented. And suddenly I was transformed. I had all the music I wanted (well 12 hours worth anyway, how much more do I need?) in a device smaller than a matchbook. I wasn’t wild about the ear buds but worth the ease of portability. I could have my music while riding my bike, while on the subway, while taking a walk, and while taking a dump if I wanted to.
And now there’s Twitter.
My first thought was that it was a site for people who were coming down off of crystal meth highs and needed desperately to have something to do with their hands that didn’t involve sex. I mean, when one is chewing one’s lip off it helps to keep busy.
But as I began to explore it a little more, I realized that Twitter was an interesting little vehicle to share and discover news bits. It’s sorta Facebook without all the crap: no pokes, no little garden, no annoying quizzes (well not yet anyway). I’ve discovered a lot of articles along the way that I wouldn’t probably have seen otherwise. For example, did you know that you could buy a house featured in the movie “Ferris Bueller” ? It’s true. This and other scintillating facts stream past one all day long. How did we ever live without it?
And then there are porn feuds. No longer the domain of ATKOL (who remembers THAT?), now Matthew Rush and Rob Romoni can get ‘beat up’ (according to one ‘journalist’) and we all get to watch. Yay. Human interaction reduced to a cock fight. In this case, literally. (Just go ahead and fuck and be done with it).
But probably the worst thing to happen to the site was Ashton Kutcher who rather pompously (I know, shocking, right?) proclaimed the triumph of the ‘normal guy’ by getting 1 million followers.
Well, if you consider a ‘normal’ guy someone who has been in a hit international television show, countless successful movies, is the pitchman for the biggest selling camera in the world and is married to perhaps one of the best known movie stars of our time.. then yes Ashton is normal.
When Joe Smith who works as a fry cook at a Chevy’s burger joint in some suburb somewhere gets a million followers, I’ll consider it a triumph for the normal guy. Until then, it’s just the product of some seriously good promotion.
As Twitter gets more and more customers it’ll turn into the old AOL. You remember AOL, right? It was this same kind of phenomena in 1995. Took itself way too seriously and anyone and everyone was a member. But they expanded too fast and the service didn’t keep up with demand, plus AOL came out with a lot of inconsistent but more importantly family friendly guidelines none of which made sense or were uniform. Consequently, bad press, dropped revenue and now the site is a joke. Hell, even Time Warner doesn’t want it (even they realized what a disaster that site is).
So I’ll enjoy the egos and the self promotion (usually with little to back it up but so goes the world) and the service outages and try to see it for what it is – a fun little way to talk to other people. It’s what they used to call a chat room. And that’s an idea that even I got on board with early on, so you know that trend is over!