TWITTER: Profound or Banal?
Posted by Dean Bradshaw | Filed under News
So I just gave in..
If you’d like to be informed of the precise moment I eat my next sandwich or have the urge to shout from the rooftops through another means (on top of a blog, flickr and facebook) – follow me on twitter.
It is peculiarly addictive…
Before I joined and even now, I share the wonderful musings of techno-skeptic Margaret Wente.
“If you thought Facebook was banal, try Twitter,” says she. So why do we use the short-messaging network and how can we explain its meteoric growth? The Toronto Globe and Mail columnist/cultural anthropologist gives four possible critical explanations:
1) “Is it really hunger for community? Is it, as one Twittering friend suggested, a safe substitute for talking to yourself, something that other people tend to find disturbing?”
2) “One more symptom of mass attention-deficit disorder – yet another excuse to distract ourselves from the dull or difficult tasks at hand?”
3) “Is it really fear of dying? Maybe Twittering is just another way (like getting and sending e-mail) to reassure ourselves that we exist: Ego tweeto, ergo sum.”
4) “Maybe the drive to tweet is just the logical extension of our narcissistic age, in which nothing in the world could possibly be more fascinating (to us) than what we’re having for lunch.”
But if you can’t beat em’, join em’ …
Tags: social media
