David Harsanyi: “C’mon, admit it. Twitter is useless”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is good writing, and the man takes it down in 500 words. From The Denver Post:

Twitter’s popularity and usefulness are a mystery to me. Pressed by personal, professional and cultural forces, I sporadically deploy short missives for fear of becoming one of those cantankerous technophobes who is too dense to recognize the miracle of letting “followers” know I hate raisins or that I loved the finale of “Mad Men.”

Now, not only am I expected to transmit this minutiae mere seconds after I think it, some 20-year-old in California has decreed that I must do it within the brevity of 140 characters. This need for conciseness, in fact, induces normally articulate friends of mine to write in Prince lyrics — recklessly using “2” and “4” and “U” as words.

To this point, I’ve found Twitter so aggressively worthless that I was forced to research exactly what I was missing. In the process, I stumbled across a useful New York Times tech column penned by David Pogue that clarified all. The headline read, “Twitter? It’s What You Make It.”

In summation, like your beloved pet rock, Twitter is useful only in your imagination.

Despite this, I can’t begin to add up how many times, as a member of the media, I’ve been instructed that I need to Twitter by people who have absolutely no clue what Twittering means. How Twitter helps journalism is yet to be determined.

But the deepest mystery of Twitter is why celebrities and elected officials take part. After all, we all know they can’t write their own lines.

Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood — and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.

In these past few weeks alone, a clueless Colorado State Sen. Dave Schultheis tweeted, “Don’t for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.” NFL running back Larry Johnson took time out from his busy day of sucking at his job to ridicule his coach and question the heterosexuality (crudely) of a critical Tweeter. He lost his job.

So you see, though only a reported 11 percent of Twitter’s users are actually teenagers, nearly everyone who participates may end up sounding like one. (Young people have the good sense to head to MySpace, where they can freely post sexually provocative pictures — with music!) I certainly have no cleavage to ratchet up my “follower” numbers.

As a blogging, Facebooking, texting American who values the explosion of democratic user-generated Internet content and its contribution to intellectual debate, political activism, government transparency, entertainment, access to data and community, I can safely say I still see no reason to tweet.

Naturally, this phenomenon is growing by approximately 1 million percent yearly. Maybe this is just where I get left behind by technology. Still, I’m sticking with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who called Twitter the “poor man’s e-mail system” — and considering e-mail is completely free and allows you to form complete sentences, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.