Mar 31, 2008

The "MeM" Twitter Addiction

I call Twitter "MeM", and the general act of tweeting or posting "MeMing" (me-eming) because of its tendency toward obsessive narcissism.

In the past day, I received a string of Tweets that were as follows: "at work, early", "grading & then on 2 podcasting", "doing errands. woot!", "lunching", "eating sandwich", "breathing". Etc, ad nauseam.

The tag line is "what are you doing?" and Twitter delivers by exposing the minutiae of our lives. The simple sharing of day-to-day activity of people you know. But is it really sharing if you are simply advertising yourself and your activities? When everything is a headline, a media event, doesn't it lose meaning? Can we be conscious while constantly being on exhibit? And there is a cycle of exhibition vs. paranoia (look at me/are you looking) that displaying the spectacle of the self creates. Twitter is a manifestation of either Jean Baudrillard's dreams or worst nightmare.

I am not anti-Twitter. I appreciate its asynchronicity. It connects disparate people and communicates snapshot information very well. And it merges movements in social software usage, such as personal blogging, LPIs, and IM status messages, and creates a fascinating, contradictory vortex of Me. Is it ephemeral or permanent? Important or vacuous? Public or private?

Twitter evolves constantly. In the past few weeks alone, you can now use Skitch to twitter an image, there are Tweviews (mini Twitter reviews), and 17 ways to visualize Twitter.

But does this make our lives better? Richer? Deeper? What value does it add? There is an extreme loneliness to shouting out "me" statements into the great void. And little purpose that I can detect. But I am happy to be proven wrong.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do twitter, but only when its "for a reason". Its a good way to share notes during a class, conference or event. For example I was at PLA and tweeted during the various presentations. This way others could share in my "notebook" as I took "notes".

panoply said...

interesting, thanks for your comment. it seems you are saying that you usually twitter "what i am thinking" rather than "what i am doing". do you think of this as connecting or sharing? do others in your network share their notes as well?

Unknown said...

yeah, i do admittedly sometimes get vain and let people know what i'm doing, though why anyone cares is beyond me. I like how Jessamyn at librarian.net desrcibed the point of tweeting: "1. create a short pithy easy to update RSS feed of news or information or links that you can repurpose to put on your blog, website, Facebook profile or elsewhere. 2. communicate with librarians who are on twitter in droves. "

I definitely end up digging up really interesting links etc from the 39575849 librarians who are all over twitter.