Twittering Idiot

Since my rant runneth over this week about social networking; I thought I should probably address the phenomena that is Twitter. I Twitter, you Twitter, we all Twitter. We are a world of Twitter Twerps.



For those of you that are still some how not in the know (obviously you don't "tweet"), Twitter is the newest of the social message utilities that we seem to be unable to live without. It is micro-blogging for the blogger on the go; you can send short updates to your website, blog, MySpace, Facebook, or whatever other social utility you prefer. You can also download really fun applications such as TweetDeck and Twitterific that can be installed on your phone so that you can send and receive updates all day long on people you follow.



What do you "tweet" about? Yourself of course! What you are doing every moment of your bombastically egocentric little existence. In one hundred and forty characters or less of course. Because not only are you important, but you are so in demand that you can only bleat out a hint of your profound thoughts, a smidgen of your infinite wisdom to your enthralled audience of fellow Tweeters.



Do forgive me for this observation, but this Twitter phenomenon is the final key to what is going to destroy the fabric of the universe and bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Not the current worldwide economic crisis, not stem cell research, not global warming, not Proposition 8, and certainly not our sick fascination with Heidi and Spence's relationship. Just the very nature of unleashing your every asinine little thought into an online universe populated with an infinite number of other little thought clogs is so overwhelming to me that I truly believe that this is where our evil little electronic devices will finally have what they need to turn on us. They were just waiting for the sort of collective consciousness that a social messenger site can provide. Through our tweets, they shall know us. And when they take over, we will have to listen to the hideous sound of our new masters twittering away in their metallic whines into eternity.

I just checked my Twitter account to read the tweets of the people I follow. It doesn't look like anyone had a particularly interesting day. One guy is allergic to something. TMZ tweeted lots of gossip about Alyson Hannigan's fetus. Some girl says that nothing is going to change. Another tweeter is trying to get us to enter various contests to win things. My list is populated with the random thoughts of a group of strangers as they narrate their vacuously uninteresting day. This is what puzzles me about Twitter. Why would anyone find my random thoughts interesting enough to actually subscribe to them? I try to Twitter meaningfully, as in "I just posted a new hilarious piece on my blog." and that's about it for me for the day. This was another thing the writer's publicity people told me to do to increase my "web presence".

Now stay with me here. If you saw someone standing in the middle of a crowded sidewalk and every few minutes they just randomly shouted their inner monologue to the world in a short burst of incongruous verbalization; what would you think? We call those crazy people where I'm from; like "Oh Lord, poor old Miss Thelma has wandered off from her nurse. If we don't get her soon, she might call the Pastor's wife a godless whore again." Twitterworld seems like a huge universe of people just relaying useless information about themselves to others in some curious attempt to add meaning and validity to what must surely be a mundane existence. Cro-Magnon humans left behind cave drawings, Hammurabi and Moses left us laws, the ancient Greeks and Romans gave us philosophy, Newton and many others gave us science, and now at the epoch of our era we have given the world social networking via Twitter and MySpace. It's a shame George Orwell is dead as it would have done him good to see that the future did not bring loss of individuality to our society that he predicated in "1984". If anything our foundationless and overblown sense of self importance has led to a preemptive declaration of our right to assert our fatuous and opinionated existence on everyone.

That's why I just blog anyway; my thoughts are utterly too important to simply tweet.


Now I don't mind reading a famous person's tweet. Once or twice anyway. Truthfully I don't listen to real people in my life that often. I just sort of take in bits and pieces of their conversation as I figure out what I'm going to blog about that day or decide where I want to have lunch. I also only take in the flotsam that I plan on using against them later. My family has become positively paranoid about my reporting of their eccentricities and try to avoid telling me anything.

What inspired me today to blog about Twitter was the "Cisco Fatty" incident. Apparently some IT guy got hired by Cisco and tweeted about how he didn't really like the company or his new commute, but wanted the fatty paycheck. He tweeted to the world, not just his personal circle of geeky friends. Somehow an HR person at Cisco found out and they Twitter terminated him. You know he will probably win a Darwin Award for this, how seriously idiotic can you get? I'll bet it's on his MySpace too, plus his Second Life avatar is going to get so ragged this week by all the other avatars.

You may notice my Twitter application on my blog. I thought I would have fun with it now that I have decided that my own thoughts and life are not glamorous enough to tweet about, so if I were you I would check the sidebar every now and then for preposterous tweets. My goal is to be even more affected and pretentious than other "serious" tweeters or "twiterati". However please let me know if I become a "tweetaholic" , so that we can stage a "tweet-ox" or a stint in "tweetabilitation" for me. I would hate to be known as a "twitterita" or even worse a "tweeterbox".

Ecrasez l'infâme!

Love and Kisses,

Cult Diva