This has been cross-posted from PluggedOut, because I feel it is important.
For some time now I have been using the social communication service known as “Twitter” (my page over there is here). For those who have no idea, twitter is a social networking service that allows you to tag a number of people as friends, who you can then send messages to en-mass. You can send and receive those messages via a number of means, with the primary ones being instant messaging, and SMS on your mobile phone.
While it’s been fun sending and receiving “twitters”, I have noticed a trend among the more die-hard users to post the minutiae of their life. They post what they are having for breakfast, what radio station they are listening to, what shoes they put on today, what colour tie they are wearing, how long they have been on the train for, what station they have arrived at, what the person sat next to them is like… it grinds you down after a while.
I will admit I have been guilty in the past - usually during periods of boredom - of using twitter in this manner. I’d like to call this style of messaging “documenting life”. The problem is 99% of our lives are boring. Nobody really wants to know that you are 5 minutes late for work, or that you are listening to your iPod. People want to know interesting stuff. They want to know that you really want to kiss the girl sat opposite you on that train. They want to know that your colleague should be marched in front of a firing squad, and why.
Twitters should perhaps ask questions. “There is a pretty girl sat across from me on the train - do I smile at her?”…
We are human. There are some aspects of our lives we like to hear about. There are other aspects that we have no interest in. If a few more people kept that in mind when posting to twitter, there would be a lot more people adding each other as friends.
Perhaps modern life doesn’t encourage interesting events. Perhaps the days of grand gestures, taking risks, and telling stories are coming to an end.
What do you think?