Twitter, Shakespeare, Seinfeld, and Crack
As some of you may have noticed, I recently broke down and joined Twitter. For a long time, I actively resisted jumping on the bandwagon for no other reason than I didn't want to be so transparently populist. However, once my roommate joined, it took less than two weeks for me to realize just how useful it could be.
I get thoughts throughout the day that are too short and/or bizarre and/or simple to expand upon. That's why I started those thoughts of the day a while back. Once I found out that I could post those thoughts on Twitter from my phone, I got so excited that I peed my pants a little. Unfortunately, I was sitting on a cloth chair at the time, and now my whole room smells like I just ate asparagus.
If I could distill my feelings about Twitter into a single sentence, it would be this: DO NOT JOIN TWITTER. It is the white man's crack. That's why, in the last week, I haven't posted here, I haven't shaved, and I've only gone to the bathroom four times. At first, I thought it was basically just Facebook status updates without any of that cumbersome "usefulness." I couldn't have been more wrong.
You see, Twitter's evil genius is in its 140 character limit. Anything longer than that gets cut off and won't show up in the public timeline (though people can still read it if they click on the ellipses at the end of the post, but honestly, that is just way too much work). It forces you to be more creative whenever you need to edit something down. You have to get rid of all the unnecessary crap, so it trains you to be a more succinct writer.
Also, you can't really communicate more than one thought at a time, so it feels a bit like drive-by blogging. As Polonius famously said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit." George Costanza would be the first to observe that Twitter is a wonderful personality showcase. You post and then you're gone. No fuss, no muss, no titles. It's horrendously addicting, and it's almost as fun as hitting old people with shovels.
Another benefit of the character limit is the fact that it makes it easy for even the busiest of people to tweet (yes, that's officially what it's called; I know it's retarded), which means that a whole bunch of celebrities, writers, and comedians use it. You actually feel like you're getting to know some of them, and you can respond to anything they write (no guarantees that they'll read it, though, and they can easily block you if you're a creep or ugly, so don't ruin it for the rest of us, assface).
So that's my explanation for why I haven't written anything in quite a while, and I'm sticking to it.
Once again, DO NOT JOIN TWITTER.
I get thoughts throughout the day that are too short and/or bizarre and/or simple to expand upon. That's why I started those thoughts of the day a while back. Once I found out that I could post those thoughts on Twitter from my phone, I got so excited that I peed my pants a little. Unfortunately, I was sitting on a cloth chair at the time, and now my whole room smells like I just ate asparagus.
If I could distill my feelings about Twitter into a single sentence, it would be this: DO NOT JOIN TWITTER. It is the white man's crack. That's why, in the last week, I haven't posted here, I haven't shaved, and I've only gone to the bathroom four times. At first, I thought it was basically just Facebook status updates without any of that cumbersome "usefulness." I couldn't have been more wrong.
You see, Twitter's evil genius is in its 140 character limit. Anything longer than that gets cut off and won't show up in the public timeline (though people can still read it if they click on the ellipses at the end of the post, but honestly, that is just way too much work). It forces you to be more creative whenever you need to edit something down. You have to get rid of all the unnecessary crap, so it trains you to be a more succinct writer.
Also, you can't really communicate more than one thought at a time, so it feels a bit like drive-by blogging. As Polonius famously said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit." George Costanza would be the first to observe that Twitter is a wonderful personality showcase. You post and then you're gone. No fuss, no muss, no titles. It's horrendously addicting, and it's almost as fun as hitting old people with shovels.
Another benefit of the character limit is the fact that it makes it easy for even the busiest of people to tweet (yes, that's officially what it's called; I know it's retarded), which means that a whole bunch of celebrities, writers, and comedians use it. You actually feel like you're getting to know some of them, and you can respond to anything they write (no guarantees that they'll read it, though, and they can easily block you if you're a creep or ugly, so don't ruin it for the rest of us, assface).
So that's my explanation for why I haven't written anything in quite a while, and I'm sticking to it.
Once again, DO NOT JOIN TWITTER.
posted by Vaughan at
2:07 PM
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