"Twitter" is Aptly Named

One of the most oft repeated pieces of advice that is given to writers these days by bloggers, speakers, publishers, and agents is that in publicizing ourselves, we should take advantage of the new "social media," including Twitter.  This strikes me as completely bizarre.  I can understand the use of Twitter as sort of an instant electronic bulletin board which might contain a useful message such as "Game called on account of rain."  Otherwise, I don't understand the point.  I just can't imagine that anyone would want to read about the process of my writing--140 characters at a time.

Hey everyone, after 15 minutes of agonizing, I decided to change a semi-colon in the last paragraph to a comma.

Did anyone need to know that?  Does anyone care?  I don't even care.  (For the record, that was just an example.  I don't agonize over punctuation in any case, especially commas.  I'll throw in a comma every now and then at random just to show that I keep a supply at the house, but otherwise, I'm not particularly concerned about them.)

Actually, I can think of one Twitter message that I would send in order to publicize myself:  Buy my book!  If you already bought one, buy two for your friends.  If you've done that, buy 2 more for the friends you haven't made yet.

As communication technology grows increasingly accessible we have fewer intelligent thoughts to communicate and Twitter seems to be the ultimate example of that premise.  The current commercial for a new phone (Verizon?) actually makes fun of the banality of most Twitter messages with a newsman at a desk saying something to the effect of "This just in:  Mary is psyched for sandals weather."

At least this new technology is aptly named:  Twitter is for twits.

P. S.  If any of my readers Twitter, then I sort of apologize.  And buy my book.

Comments

[Jennifer]

I am just as puzzled over Twitter. When I was in grad school a few years ago, one of my classmates said to me, "I have a Twitter." And I asked, "A what?" I thought he was coming onto me...hah

[Lizzy Kipps]

As an active Twitterer (hopefully not a twit) here are the positive things I would say about it:
1. It's a fun challenge. Can I say something meaningful or funny in 140 characters or less?
2. It's a great networking tool.
3. In a way, it puts almost everything on the internet together in one place. I don't have to go check 20 different sites, I can just see if they've been updated via my handy-dandy Twitterfeed.
4. It brings you news super fast. Pretty much every major news story or significant event of the past few months I have learned about on Twitter.
5. A lot of Twitter users are just plain fun to follow. I joined in the first place to follow all the baseball players. The majority of them are pretty dull, but then you have a guy like Dirk Hayhurst who is just awesome and funny and always interacts with his followers. Guys like him are what make Twitter cool.

The only negative I really have is that it is so addictive... but I'll shut up now. :)

[Walt]

Well, we can use Twitter as one more reason not to get any writing done.