So, I finally join Twitter. I don't really know why, except that it seemed like something everyone was doing these days.
I've resisted joining Twitter for years now, mainly because I wasn't quite sure what I would do with a Twitter account that I wasn't already doing with this blog.
But yet, the thought kept lurking at the back of my mind, everyone else was doing it. Am I missing out on something? Is there some sort of pleasure that only the initiated know? Finally I decided I might as well give it a try. (You only live once, and all that, might as well take some risks and create a Twitter account, even if I wasn't sure what I needed it for.)
Actually the timing is not completely random. I recently broke down and bought a smart phone. (I avoided buying a smart phone for as long as I could, just as 10 years ago I avoided buying a cell phone for as long as I could. But eventually cell phones became a social necessity, because people stopped making any plans in advance and everyone relied on calling up people on the phone at the last minute, and if you didn't have a cell phone you suddenly didn't have a social life. Once I discovered how much of modern social life is being conducted via chatting on smart phones and Facebook, the urge to be included--and my constant paranoia about being left out--overcame my technophobia, and I broke down and make the purchase.)
Obviously Twitter is perfectly designed for smart phones, so I figured I might as well try out and account.
So, now, what does one do with a Twitter account?
My first couple - tweets, I flirted with the idea of self-promotion of this blog. But then this brief moment of insanity passed, and I regained my senses. (There is a lot of crap and self-indulgence on this blog. The way I justify all this self-indulgence is by telling myself that no one is forced to read this blog--readers come and go as they wish, and if I'm writing self-indulgent crap then at least no one is reading it who doesn't want to. Spamming people's twitter feeds with links to my blog would obviously under-cut this justification entirely.)
So, for the moment, I've settled on using Twitter mainly just to link to articles I find interesting. Or retweet stuff from other people. At the moment, it's more or less just a record of my Internet surfing. And I don't suspect it will ever grow into anything more profound than that.
Anyway, for anyone who's interested, I'm over here.
(PS--This guy here has a Twitter account using my name, but I have no idea who he is. He's not me, at any rate, so don't get confused.)
Update: 2017
I've reversed my policy on tweeting out my own blog posts. I've decided that tweeting out what I'm up to on this blog is a good way for anyone who is interested to keep track of what I'm up to, and anyone who is not interested wouldn't follow me to begin with.
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on the Federal Reserve
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4 comments:
I deactivated my twitter account after it got hacked. What an unpleasant experience. I was evidently a complete non-entity as far as Twitter was concerned -- no response whatsoever from tech.
I enjoyed following certain media types on it -- Erik Davis especially. These days I'll drop in on their feed every couple of weeks, just to catch up. Otherwise it was just more noise, which I already get on FB.
So what happened in the end? Presumably you must have gotten some control back over your account if you were able to deactivate it then
I always had "some" control -- the problem was, so did the hacker. I could post and delete the hacker posts that kept showing up, but it didn't matter how much of Twitter's security measures I added, those damn posts (links to Estonia, more often than not) kept showing up. I've no idea what sort of bot they used to manage that stunt, but it was impossible to out-foil, except by self-destruction. Seems strange to me that they couldn't reactivate my account, but so far so good.
Hmm... Well, here's hoping I don't have the same problem. Anyway,you're not wrong about it being unnecessary noise. I'm finding it hard to justify my account now with anything I couldn't do via Facebook or this blog
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