Saying it in 140 characters (or fewer) is a pretty good gimmick. As one for whom headline writing is an occupational mainstay, you’d expect a medium in which terse delivery is the only way would be my medium of choice.
Bravo for succinct communication, I say! Just the same, boo on a medium that can be both refreshingly terse and tediously cutesy at the same time.
Bravo for empowerment of the people to speak! Boo on those very people who use up their time at the podium with a litany of mindless drivel.
Bravo for the ability to join conversations across the miles! Boo on a medium that pulls you so soundly into meaningless discourse with strangers that essential real-time engagement with those in your own life becomes impaired.
Bravo for tools that advance freedom! Boo on a technological development so demanding of its dependents that it enslaves for the 95% of the time it is not liberating.
I have made a conscious decision to set the Twitter bird free, and in the doing release myself from the grip of invisible talons that hold me in position and insist that I monitor constantly for actions and reactions, for Re-tweets and Mentions and Direct Messages, and the status of my Followers list too.
In the years since I’ve been tweeting, I’ve seen very little difference in how it works (my motivations and the resulting payoff) between activity on my personal account or one belonging to a publication or a political figure I was representing. You can chatter in communities for as long as you’re willing to linger, and sometimes you succeed in drawing the attention of a portion of your audience to some event or other-media posting you wish to publicize. But except for the exceedingly rare occasions in which your words do not fall as raindrops into an already fast-moving flood you are not going to move mountains.
Vanity — frail and casual, at best — is the only payoff I have realized from such devotion to the cutesy bluebird. An online stroking of the feathers, often from people I will never meet, give me 30 seconds of smug satisfaction now and then to know that someone out there briefly thought I had spun a clever line. It never causes a rush of visitors to my website that translates into a significant surge in CD sales — in the way, say, satisfied folks at a live event will come to your record table looking for a souvenir of the moment you’d just shared together.
Twitter satisfaction is ultimately akin to fantasy satisfaction. It’s not worth the devotion.
So in setting the bird free, I’m not totally abandoning Twitter. It’ll fly back now and then and land on my window sill, I’m sure. And I’ll just as certainly slide open the window and drop some bread crumbs there beside it. I might even stroke its head with a bent finger. But I’ll be perfectly clear: we’re really not all that compatible.
Life mates? No match.