Sunday, May 10, 2009

I Refuse to Twitter...

it just blows my mind hearing about the popularity of Twitter.

For those of you who have no clue what i am talking about, it is basically a program that makes watching your selected friends daily lives through short sentence updates so that you know and watch what each other are doing.  It is basically just like the Facebook newsfeed.

I don't want to say i will never get on Twitter because someone might change my mind, but it seems like an absolutely absurd idea to me!

I don't want everyone to know what i do all day.  I don't want to have to answer to the judgments and public eye of the masses.  Plus, i just want to do my best to be present in my conversations and relationships that are physically right in front of me.  Twitter seems like the next step to living our lives online.  

I laughed at the fat lazy humans in Wall-E that lived in front of a digital screen, but the more i watch the world, the scarier this concept actually looks!!!

5 comments:

Rhett said...

Amen!

Lynne Howard said...

Brent, get twitter. I know you're going to. Come on... I did. Only because my friends got it. And I wanted to get their tweets! You can control how you get the tweets on your text messages, and you don't even have to update yours if you don't want to! But it is a good way to connect socially, since people are using it. is it big there in NZ? Our church got a twitter account, and it's pretty neat. I predict you will get on twitter soon....

BJ said...

I went on facebook this year as a bit of an experiment. I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. Actually I find it an interesting pastoral tool, but only because FB taps into the deeper human dysfunctions. I can see who is wasting their time playing stupid games, sending weird gifts and taking endless quizzes on FB. People with this kind of usage essentially have no life. SO FB is their replacement for RL. I see people cry for help in their status updates which is sad that they feel unable to trust people in RL that they broadcast their angst to all. I wonder whether they realise how transparent it all is? Twitter is just one more ego enhancing medium that allows me to pretend I really am the centre of someone's universe. As a pastor I may end up going there for the otherwise dodgy reason "all my friends did it" - just to keep tabs on the undercurrents of people's angst. On the other hand, I seriouly doubt it! Is it helping people to respond to the focus of their addiction to be the focus, even in their very small ponds...

BJ said...

Brent emailed me this so blame him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ff2X_3P_4

Great quotes:

if they were really your friends wouldn't they just call...

friends don't just randomly shout into the darkness and hope someone is listening...

none of you have any friends...

Dan Eggenschwiler said...

Brent,

First of all, let me say that I completely understand your feelings. I never thought I would get twitter. Ever. It just seemed like some sort of egocentric way for people to pretend that lots of people actually care what they're doing at every moment of the day. For some people, I'm sure that's exactly what it is. But not for all.

I say this now only with the knowledge that comes from firsthand experience. I, somewhat regretfully, admit that I joined twitter. But let me say this, you will too. And you know why? It will be for the exact same reason I did. Because some day, you'll find out that you can get surf updates via twitter! And when that day comes, you will gladly succumb to the sometimes mind-numbing nonsense that is twitter.

(On a side note, you legitimately can follow things of importance, such as businesses, news sources, or event finders via twitter and they are actually quite helpful. You may check into it more for businesses than for people.)