Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

So, here’s the short (but longer than 140 characters) explanation about my change of heart regarding twitter.

Social networking has been on a climb for years. When I first go into the internet, we had to walk 10 miles backwards uphill in the snow naked just to update our diaryland pages.

After a while, livejournal was the cool thing… and get this, you had to be *invited* to join LJ, so it wasn’t just for everyone, only the *cool* people. Eventually that changed, and anyone could join, but by then we had all gone to myspace. Then came facebook (which you could only use if you were at college… sound familiar?) and then twitter.

(I know there’s a million others in their as well. Friendster, I still love ya baby.)

Now we can have a CMS on our own domains that updates all of our other various web projects. One blog update to rule them all!

Anyway, twitter always bugged me. The concept – updates limited to only 140 characters – seemed to be the perfect example of our culture’s short attention span. We aren’t going to write any more than 140 characters because no one wants to read more than 140 characters anyway, so why bother pushing our friends/family/strangers to do more? There were some exceptions, like the use of twitter in Iran earlier this year, but the majority of what I coming out of twitter was: Keep it short, make it shorter!

So this week I was at an AA meeting, and the topic was Slogans. There are a shitload of them in AA.
One day at a time.
Easy does it.
Meeting makers make it.
Keep coming back.

I mean there are literally pages of these things. One person said their sponsor hated the slogans, and described them as, “Like being stoned to death with refrigerator magnets.” Another said it made them feel like they were in preschool.

Sound like twitter to you?

I hadn’t though much about them one way or the other, but it was an interesting thing to listen to people talk about, because most people saw these slogans as tools, and not unlike the memory aids we learned in school. One small phrase to connect you to a larger, greater lesson. Please excuse my dear aunt sally, anyone?

This sort of got me thinking about Mantras, as well, and how if you develop a practice around saying a mantra, it can act as a rope to pull you back towards your center in any given situation. It’s not unlike Kirtan, either, right? A simple word or phrase, and we instill it with power. The phrase isn’t the important thing, it’s the power we put behind it.

All of this sort of made me rethink my disdain for twitter, and the culture surrounding it. I can’t deny that there are people who are and will use it to shorten their already dwindling attention spans… but that doesn’t meant that I can’t choose to use it for something larger.

So, here it is: http://www.twitter.com/jdavyd

I promise if you don’t like twitter, you won’t like this either.