10 Membranes

My Problem With Twitter

It occured to me the other day that my tweet stream is horribly boring and that ergo my life is a sad and pale reflection of the glamorous and/or clever and well informed lives of those I follow.

On further reflection I actually started to think that maybe my life wasn’t so boring; I do get out every now and again, and do get a bit of travel here and there, the odd brush of serendipity, the occasional flash of (possibly) interesting insight.

The main issue is that whenever I am actually doing something interesting I am usually so engrossed in the activity itself that it doesn’t occur to me Twitter. In fact I would go so far as saying that to Twitter at the most interesting times of ones life leads to one live at one remove from what is actually being done to an almost caricatured level. Baudrillard and Foucault could not even make this stuff up.

So, maybe the most interesting tweet streams are from the most self alienated people, only capable of constructing a persona by the constant and minute analysis of third party impressions on a given moment. Its the acme of life lived through the eyes of others, for the eyes of others. Technologies of the self, taken very literally indeed.

I’m not arguing against Twitter; I’m just saying that personally Twitter is a distraction and a record of the more humdrum aspects of daily life. I am as passionate about social media as ever.  However generally tweets are signals of the opposite of something interesting going on, whereas the lacunae between tweets are what is actually worth living for.

In short: don’t judge a person by their tweet stream. They may just get easily absorbed by the world.