Nicholas Carr on Tweets

Nicholas Carr's writing over at Rough Type often makes me think. He recently posted "Does My Tweet Look Fat?" I laughed.

I've grappled with Twitter for some time now. Yet I still don't know what I think of it.

I have no interest in knowing "What are [most people on this planet] doing?" at any particular moment in time. Most of what we do day to day is just not all of that interesting. It's routine. It's, as it must need be, mundane and perfunctory. And I personally find the narcissistic emphasis of the late 20th and early 21st centuries completely revolting. I guess, to be trite, I'm just not that into "you" when you think it's all about you.

Some have suggested to me that Twitter is more like tapping into the stream of consciousness for the world, or at least the Twitter-verse. Yikes, so much noise! My life is already filled with enough noise. Besides, managing my own stream of consciousness in real time is pretty much a full time job.

Now, when friends are traveling and tweeting pics and such: cool--I rather do find that interesting. And some virtual friends pique my interest when they tweet something fascinating or informative. But these seem to be the exception to the twitter-verse. And I suspect that almost everyone on this planet, except for my mother, has no interest in what I am doing at any particular moment in time.

So what does it say about us when our skinny little 140 character tweet is too fat? And from my vantage point, so many of the tweets that stream through this virtual spinal tap are all but anorexic--completely devoid of sustenance and meaning.

For me, tweets are too often like digital ADHD--disconnected flits of thought thereby rendered pretty meaningless. Yes, that's more like what it is to me: digital ADHD. (And don't get me wrong, I can ride that vibe for a while.)

I feel a need for deeper engagement with people than a flittering tweet here and there. And I don't really enjoy the tweet overload. I rather enjoy a good, realtime conversation--virtual or face to face. Yeah, whatever happened to the art of conversation? Surely we're not too busy for that, are we?