Idle Chatter

I’ll admit it. I’m not a Twitter user, because Twitter scares me.

Well, technically I am a Twitter user—I signed up about two weeks ago. Some kind soul named “harvarddhall” posts HUDS menu listings for lunch and dinner in concise posts, and I use Twitter’s mobile messaging tool to get those listings sent to my phone via text message. It’s great since I’m usually too lazy to type “huds” into my browser URL.

But that’s where my Twitter usage ends—there’s something about its combination of voyeurism and narcissism that just gets to me.

On the face of it, Twitter seems like a pretty neat idea. Twitter-ers post 140-character long “tweets” on anything they choose, a la Facebook’s status-update feature. They “follow” each other, so that a user’s followers can automatically see their posts on their main page. A commenting feature allows Twitter-ers to interact with tweets.

About half of the tweets I’ve seen are normal status updates: users can post “just got to the office” or “thesising in Widener,” for example. So far, this sounds a lot like Facebook, with its status updates and news feed, and I recall that Facebook encouraged these location- and action-type posts when status updates were first launched.

Yet, while on Facebook these status updates exist alongside photos, wall posts, and birthday reminders, Twitter doesn’t have much else to distract users. The entire concept of the website is based on these little snippets of information. It’s a creepy form of forced voyeurism, a means by which a Twitter-er makes sure his or her followers are aware of his or her actions at any given time.

It’s also a platform for narcissism. Users often go beyond the standard post about location to get creative with their 140 characters. I find the other half of tweets to be mainly composed of rants (customer service, Twitter site downtime, self-injury) and random introspection.

Rants I can understand—breaking a bone sucks, and it’s understandable to want to talk about it. Attempts at introspection, on the other hand, are where the problem kicks in. Public Twitter user jquaglia, for example, writes, “Do you ever have one of those days when you feel like every wishbone you pull breaks the wrong way?” Deep, man, just deep. Such self-indulgence has always existed on angsty teenage blogs like Livejournal, but now it is condensed and made absurd by its brevity. Speaking to no one in particular, about nothing in particular, in a space so short that nothing possibly meaningful can be said reeks of vanity. It boils down to the desire to appear thoughtful to the world and the need to hear one’s own voice into its most naked and ridiculous form.

In moderation, Twitter probably isn’t so bad. It’s the over-users who tweet every action and the attention-seekers posting introspection who stop me from using it (other than for HUDS menu listings). I just don’t want to turn into user Rogelio Umaña, who tweeted this gem last year: “I just found out somebody is stalking me on the Internet! :0 Should I worry? Nah! I embrace it!”


James A. Fish ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a sociology concentrator in Kirkland House.