Who Twits?

[Martin Hash]

Twitter Bird s.jpg

I've always wondered about all the people on Twitter? Do they have jobs? What jobs so they have? Everything just scrolls away so that no real conversation with people who aren't there can happen. Twits have to stay glued to their screens so that they can jump in with an insult at the slightest provocation: that doesn’t leave much time for anything else. Even if they're at home, don't they have things that need to be done? Or maybe there's just so many people that the 1% who are taking a Twitter break are still enough for a flame war.

This brings up a good question: how many people enjoy talking in real-time? If the telephone part of an iPhone was removed, I wouldn’t even notice. Anything I have to say only takes a minute, and I’m only interested for a minute in what other people have to say. My wife can yak for hours with her friends & they don’t say a damn thing, and she never watches YouTube videos on how to repair an old watch, for example.

For my part, I’ve never Twitted: the kind of conversations I want to have don't lend themselves to the 5 minutes I'm online. The way I use social media is to break up my normal work: every so often I check to see if someone has posted, decide if I have time to respond, then go back to work. For example, I might engage between writing a podcast script before switching to working on the parking brake light for my '57 Corvette. Sometimes I want to debate but it's ruined if everybody is not debating in good faith so I literally Block 100s of people on Facebook. These are people I would ignore IRL, why should I have to suffer their presence online where they're even bigger asses? Frankly, I'm not looking for diverse views unless they're thought-provoking: everyone has an opinion but I don’t have to hear it.