Can Someone Explain Twitter?

I signed up at Twitter, initially, to follow Mrs. Palin and Amanda Palmer.   I couldn’t handle the former but the latter rewarded me with a free concert last night.

Then, I started tweeting just to annoy people. When that didn’t go anywhere, I forgot about Twitter. Then I came back and tried again.

Now, I have 124 followers but sadly for them I have nothing to say. Nontheless, I go there a couple of times a day and torture myself by scrolling through pointless nonsense tweeted by people I don’t know and mostly wouldn’t want to know.

Why are we tweeting, everyone? Whatever the motives that are driving Twitter, it can’t be good for civilization.

Here are my limited observations so far:

1. People want you to know what they ate.
2. People need to communicate every idle scrap of thought that pops into their heads.
3. People like to LOL at one another.
4. People think they derive status from their Tweeting associations.
5. People use Twitter instead of personal email, in order to have an audience.
6. The more people you follow, the more time-consuming it is to find anything interesting.
7. Kanye West is a big deal.
8. It’s important to follow another rapper and then retweet their illiterate musings.

BUT! On a positive note, Twitter has taught me this:

9. It’s fun to read people’s tweets as they watch “X Factor” especially if you’ve never seen it.
10. Rumi Neely is actually smart, witty and gracious. I like her! I stand corrected.

Twitter is adding to the clutter I’m stuffing my brain with on a daily basis and I know it’s time to be more selective. I’ve unsubscribed to a million mailing lists with ten million more to go.   I’m finding that I know too much about Lanvin for Target and too little about world affairs.   It’s going to be tough to unlearn my bad Internet habits. We’ll see how far I get.

Okay. Now explain Twitter.