The world of Twitter is a world that I do not, and don’t think I will ever, understand. Wikipedia describes Twitter as “an online social networking service and microblogging
service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".
It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey
and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with
over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and
handling over 1.6 billion search
queries per day. It has been
described as the SMS
of the Internet.”
So
back in 2009 when I found out that Twitter was going to be the new Facebook (which
I am an avid user of) I had to have one, so I created an account and looked
around… and thought, what the hell, this is so boring, and until now I haven’t gone
back. I personally do not understand how people can do it, even now while I am
trying to research how many people follow who, I have stumbled across a
particular celebrity ‘twit’, who shall not be named who has fully embraced the ‘twitterverse’, and is doing a seemingly good job at it considering they
have 14,292,511 followers. However, what are these followers
reading that is so important? Here is a sample of what I found…
“What I would look light with light eyes?”“Geometrically gorgeous!”“Painted my nails with ‘it's all about the glam’”
Really…
I mean REALLY? I cannot believe that over 14 million people have read such
trivial things. After some more searching on other certain blogs, I have come
to conclusion. Twitter is a place where people go to read (or post) narcissistic,
self-absorbed comments. Seriously!!! I mean if such energy was utilized in such
a way that would change the world and bring awareness to some of the ‘world’s biggest problems’ then maybe there would be more world awareness to issues in
the world that are affecting everyone in the world to some degree. But no, they
are too busy taking self-photos of themselves saying how ugly they look in
them, flogging particular products/shows constantly in their posts and making
sure that everyone knows where they are and what they are doing every minute of
the day.
Did I miss something? Since when is it interesting to be filled in
every 5 minutes that a celebrity will be releasing an album, and then doing a
countdown for it for a whole week? I find it astounding that people not only
follow these posts, but also think that is it somewhat important to know these
things.
Further, to read such things and for it to become normalised or even
have such ideas reinforced into people’s minds is going to influence the way
that the general population/non celebrity person is going to view themselves. Don’t
get me wrong, I love talking about myself, but after reading such tweets, it is
like reading a one sided conversation about how great another person’s life is
and that no matter what I do I will never be as good as them, which is true to
an extent, I will never (unless I get lucky) have a disposable income with a
somewhat influential perspective on the world. To have such power however, can
be a dangerous thing if used carelessly. BUt dont just take my word for it... go see for yourself and really think about what people are saying or trying to say.
