Tweet, tweet

I resisted joining the so-called Twitterverse for a long time. It’s stupid, I said, who wants to follow anyone so closely? I don’t care that you’re staring existentially into your morning doughnut.

I also felt this way about Wikipedia. As a journalism major in college, at the beginning of each semester we were given the Wikipedia lecture. The Wikipedia lecture was, in many cases, treated more seriously than the plagiarism lecture, and we all actually had to sign a form saying we acknowledged the plagiarism lecture. Wikipedia is not a source. If you cite Wikipedia in an article, you will fail that assignment. In one class, we each created a user account, went in and made a spurious edit to a Wikipedia article and then counted the days until the error was corrected. Most of the people forgot about their edits until halfway through the semester, when they received an email saying their accounts had been suspended.I would go on wild rants to my friends about how much I hated Wikipedia. While I still don’t think that Wikipedia is a legitimate source for most of what I call news, it’s my go-to website if I want to find out if Rudy von Hacklheber was a real guy or just a figment of Neal Stephenson’s imagination.

Anyway, I managed to avoid Twitter until Neil Gaiman joined and started tweeting things that didn’t make it to his blog. Neil Gaiman is apparently the twitter gateway drug. Now I find myself tweeting all the time, to the point that a friend has given me his login so I can tweet random song lyrics. All the Jump, Little Children and Wicked soundtrack you could ever want!

Like most social media, Twitter tends to be what you make of it. If you, like me, only have 24 followers (and only know half of those personally), it’s not really very social. I find Twitter to be very one way: I send links I find amusing out into the ether and, most of the time, nothing more happens with them. Occasionally, someone retweets a link I’ve sent, or I get some crazy following me because they completely misunderstood a link I tweeted. When that happens, I find myself inordinately excited. Look! Someone paid attention to me! I’m like a puppy. There are a whole lot of questions that come with the satisfaction of having been tweeted. Why is this something I value? Is the Twitterverse just an incestuous web of hands patting their own backs? Is this the proverbial sound of one hand clapping?

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ll likely keep tweeting until I get bored or until job ads stop asking for people who are proficient in the 140-character sound bite.

Obviously, I will alert my corner of the twitterverse that I have written a new post for my blog. Perhaps it’s not incestuous so much as it is recursive. Round and round and round we go…