I Hate Twitter

I don't "get" it. Maybe because I am a mathematician my brain is wired differently than the common folk, but I really hate Twitter. I deleted my Facebook account when I read that they wanted ownership of what I wrote (and I haven't been back since), but Facebook makes sense. It is social networking which allows groups of people to stay in touch over great distances. It is a child of globalization. I just see no appeal in using Twitter. Not only do I enjoy writing, I also enjoy reading and thinking. As a writer, I don't want some "java script" to tell me to stop writing when I want to communicate my opinion. I don't want to have to sit there with more to say wondering how I can condense what I have already written into less.

When I write, I want to write. On the flip side, when I am absorbing content from my favourite pundits, I don't want them to have the same restrictions. I want them to let it all out. This "movement" of condensing thought into point form may appeal to a large demographic of people, but that doesn't mean that it benefits us as a culture. We are "devolving" communication. Do we endeavour to delete as many words as possible from complete sentences? If and when we are flying around in "starships" are we going to be condensing entire sentences into single words? Gene Roddenberry needs to re-write the entire dialogue of Star Trek if this is the case.

This is the perspective of a writer who has yet to "monetize" his site. I score about 1000 clicks a day of readership, and perhaps if I were on twitter I could increase that hit count exponentially. Two of my favourite "opinionists” on the planet are Bill Simmons and Charles Adler. I crave their opinion on everything, except maybe on asinine subject matters like basketball or "talking to strangers". But as soon as they jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, they began to constantly promote their "tweets" because they are in the "attracting eyeballs" business and they get paid for hits (I "pay it forward" by linking ESPN and www.charlesadler.com on my site). I don't condemn them for "tweeting", but I have never logged into either of their Twitter pages. The pundits didn't create the craze of Twitter, but once large numbers of people started "tweeting", the pundits migrated to where the hits were. In the new world, hits equals money if you are being paid for it.

As a blogger with a modest readership, I want eyeballs and eventually I want to be paid to have an opinion. But I will never embrace Twitter. Infact, I am actively cheering for a diminished readership of "Twitterers". I am cheering for the revival of complete sentences, where people can write their entire opinion in a post and still benefit financially from doing so. I want to be paid to do what I do, but I fear that if I "monetize" my site, I will become a slave to a destructive medium. I do track my hits, and if I do a post titled "Igantieff is poop" I can get over a thousand hits. If I write 2000 words of graduate level economic theory that can benefit society, I get less than 100 hits. Do I write what people want to read, or do I write what they ought to read? Again, I want to be paid to have an opinion, but I don't want to reduce my art to a demeaning level that gets more hits but reduces the quality of the art.

I don't know where this goes, but one thing that I do know, is that I hate Twitter.