Michael Foody

Twitter is sort of stupid. The character limit is really restrictive and bars all but the most banal information from being disseminated. The community is has an off-putting self-promotional streak where there’s this implied quid pro quo of follow me and I’ll follow you tit for tat. The trending topics are almost always stupid and easy for spammers to game. And at this point not all that many people I know use it.

Still I use twitter and I like twitter here’s why:

• There’s  no friends in twitter. Myspace and facebook have friends, but friend is a word that has a meaning in the real world. A pretty big important meaning. Most people don’t have all that many friends but at the same time it’s a big deal to specifically not be friends with someone. This social pressure creates a clutter where people who don’t matter at all to you anymore if they ever did monopolize most of your social bandwith.
• The previous reason is dumb. Realistically once more of my acquaintances start using twitter it will be like facebook only an even bigger pain because I can’t just accept them as friends and then block them forever when they’re wall to wall boring.
• On the other end of the spectrum is the fact that it’s sort of fun to follow people that are kind of famous. Like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling basically young comedians that are on Thursday night NBC sitcoms who are ethnically Indian. This is where the character limit is golden. I can get little manageable voyeuristic insights into the lives of people who do things more interesting than I do but still not feel like I care too much about them.
• This is the biggest one. I try and write jokes and twitter gives me a reason to try to be funny, but it also is dumb enough that I don’t feel like I have the expectation to actually be funny. This is a goldmine. Really. I twittered this: While watching the man standing on the building’s ledge contemplating his own death I grew to regret my Kriss Kross ringtone. Jump Jump. See it is only sort of funny. If it wasn’t for twitter I would have no use for things that were sort of funny. I would have to wait for inspiration to strike me. And it probably wouldn’t. The freedom to be mediocre most of the time is something that is necessary to be excellent ever and twitter gives me a way to be mediocre. And that’s why I like twitter.