David Bullard

"I went onto Twitter at the suggestion of a colleague who is slightly younger than I am and has become a social media evangelist. This apparently is the way to go and before long the whole world will communicate in short sound bites (or maybe bytes) with one another. "Nation shall speak crap unto nation" to bastardise the motto of the British Broadcasting Authority. This would all be terribly exciting if a) I could work out how to make money from it and b) people said anything of consequence.

I haven't bothered to set my cell phone up for Twitter so I only check in when I am online but that is bad enough. I'm following a couple of geeks who went to a "geekretreat" last weekend. Where's the Enola Gay when you need her? They get terribly excited about new gadgets and obviously they burble on about them to each on Twitter which is all a bit sad. Then there's the person I am following who has written books and is known to be witty. So why is she writing that she has just eaten a custard cream biscuit or telling us about her washing machine? Most of the other entries are just as banal. Someone Twittered the other day that he had just found his seat at what used to be called Ellis Park and was looking forward to the game. Now, who goes to Ellis Park and bothers to get a cellphone out to tell people he doesn't even know that he is about to watch a soccer match? This is seriously boring.

The great virtue of Twitter is that all these banalities are restricted to 140 characters so at least the messages are short and boring rather than long and boring. However, they add no value to my life which is why I think I might have to de-Twitter myself. Although nobody is saying anything of much interest we still think this is cool because its, like, technology innit? Thanks to things like Facebook and Twitter we are becoming absorbed in trivial minutiae and losing our ability to think and converse. Personally I'd rather have a good face to face argument and I can't do that if I'm restricted to 140 characters on a website. I'd much prefer to have a conversation with a real person over a convivial lunch than blast off short messages to people I hardly know. The problem is that as more people accept Facebook and Twitter as the normal way to communicate with their fellow human beings the stock of conversationalists is going to dry up. I might be forced to read Ulysses after all."