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Audacious Aunnie’s adventures:
Twitter calling
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I am an oversharer. According to urbandicionary.com, the definition of the verb overshare is: “When you get so drunk you tell a good friend about the time you were crazily in love with an androgynous looking person who later turned out to be a female. Your drunken confession delves into epiphanies about your latent homosexuality, your past crushes on (and platonic affairs with) older married people and your dabblings in suicidal behavior. Instances of oversharing are often followed by headaches, embarrassment, vulnerability, extensive journaling and/or therapy and (sometimes) long walks alone.”
While the definition is a bit extreme, you get the idea. When a friend invited me to join Twitter via e-mail, I thought it would be a great opportunity to indulge my need to overshare. At twitter.com the tagline is, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”
Well, Twitter and friends, right now I am eating some cheese and crackers and writing this column. And after just a few days of my Twitter membership, I am discovering how cumbersome it is. It isn’t an oversharer’s dream.
Do people care about my boring days or even my sordid ones? But more importantly, do I really care about what television shows my Twitter friends are watching, how shitty their days were, or that they are eating a Reuben sandwich? Although I care in some respect, I don’t need play-by-play accounts of their days. Maybe I am mean and becoming more curmudgeonly as the days pass, but if I wanted to know how my friends were or what they were up to, I would call and ask and that is where the premise of Twitter doesn’t work for me.
Andrew Lavallee of the Wall Street Journal writes, “These services elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel ‘too’ connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cell phone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.”
Privacy settings can be modified to accept only requests from users the account owner chooses. Users can also set time limits of what hours the Tweets (the Twitter updates) come. I have mine set from 10 a.m. – 10 p.m., but it doesn’t curb the annoyance. There is a person who I follow (what it’s called when you get someone’s updates), who I will not name here, that updates in excess of 20 times per day. The incessant updates seem almost egotistical-she thinks people care so much they need every detail. The same person follows more than 650 people. I don’t understand why anyone would want to know what 650 different people are doing. There are people I don’t know who have asked to follow me which is even more curious. Why would they want to know what I, a complete stranger, do during the day?
People in our society have gotten too obsessed and voyeuristic. Nobody can do anything alone anymore. It seems the idea of a private existence, without constant update diarrhea coming from people’s souls, leads to feelings of meaninglessness. It begs the question, what do people talk about when they see each other in person? Twitter holds no functionality for me. Bye Twitter.
ANDREA OYARZABAL
Arbiter Columnist
