Not all that Twitters is gold.

I was the last person in my class to get a cell-phone. I swore never to get one, claiming that it was completely unnecessary for me. Ditto email-account. Ditto laptop. Ditto facebook. All of which are things I feel more or less dependent on today. So, knowing myself, I’ll probably end up getting a Twitter-account sooner or later.
I think that the idea of Twitter is essentially fine. I like the efficiency that the short updates provide, and the idea of keeping people up-to-date on your life through regular posts seems reasonable. But when people start updating tweets about things that are simply irrelevant to anyone else, the point gets lost. Is it really necessary to know exactly what everyone is doing, every minute of the day? I think it is questionable exactly how much one can convey through 140 characters. Is that not the essence of shallowness – replacing actual conversation or opinion-sharing with short, instant updates?

When you are far away from home, it makes sense to give out these short updates so that people who you might not necessarily have the need to write a full email to can still get a general idea about what is going on in your life. However, I would argue that the importance of knowing what is going on in someone’s life is not really relevant if you don’t also get to know how and why. Due to the briefness of the updates, Twitter is inevitably superficial and I think it is worth considering whether a superficial update on someone’s life is preferable to no update at all.

However, I do think that Twitter can simply be seen as a fun way to share your thoughts in a convenient way. I think that it is essentially a good concept, but that the way some people tend to use Twitter as a tool of narcissism and self-absorption is simply annoying. Perhaps people want to believe that they are interesting enough for somebody to follow their every move. But when it goes as far as people posting their tweet-status simply as: ‘Is twittering’, the pointlessness reaches a peak and I have to say that all that twitters truly is not gold.
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