Twitter Me This

I've recently joined Twitter, and was promptly welcomed by my much tech-savvier friends to the "Twitterverse." Until this week, I avoided joining for reasons which remain quite murky to me. I can only hope that the process of writing them out, as I plan to do here, will clarify those reasons to a shiny sparkly finish. Without further ado, let's take the plunge into Murky-ville together!

Until seeing a presentation in technical communications recently at a conference, I would have argued that Twitter was an unnecessary timesuck living parasitically off the back of the greatest of timesucks, the internet. What is the use of yet another social networking tool for those who already post to facebook, write a blog, keep up with e-mail, use all of their unlimited texts, and call their parents back home on a regular basis? Oh, little did I know.

A techcom professor presented a fascinating case study of a group of folks from Wichita, KS who named themselves "ICT2DC." They describe their group formation process as: "meet on twitter, celebrate Obama's election, & take a road trip to the Inauguration." Each separate piece of this process provides plenty of thought-food, but we'll just start with "meet on twitter."

The idea of actually meeting someone new on Twitter astounds me. Three days into my Twitter experience (For which there should really be a word. I suggest "Twittience," although I am open to other, better neologisms.), I have eleven followers, with all of whom I have an "in-person" or "real-world" relationship. Of those eleven, ten I met while studying engineering outside of Boston, MA. These are the people I turn to when I can't figure out how to resize a photo or I just need to mainline some quick conversation about scientifically nerdy stuff. They're fantastic, and provide a fabulous counterpoint to the English/literary/book-centric mindset that could easily overwhelm my life. I feel more balanced and knowledgeable for their friendships, not to mention less like a humanistic, technophobic Luddite. It would certainly be a steep and slippery path to that latter state of affairs if I limited my interactions with my mac to the necessary word-processing and e-mailing of everyday graduate student-hood.

But had I not had those friends already, had I not made some mixed-up choices at seventeen about what I wanted to be when I grew up, had I not met these smart, funny, interesting people who just happen to build robots and widgets and real things while I make mountains out of intangible molehills, had none of these things happened, would I now be enjoying a tech-fix on Twitter?

I would wager not.

But this group who met on Twitter: they found each other through shared interests, particularly shared political interests. Were I to go scouting for people from here who think like me and happen to post on Twitter, I'm still not clear what added value I would bring to my life. The ICT2DC group actually got together in person and took a thoroughly blogged and tweeted road-trip to the capital. Although the experience sounds interesting, it's not one I'm up for. I have close relationships here in Vegas, not to mention dogs and school responsibilities. Road-tripping is a blast, but riding in a borrowed van with five potentially smelly people who I don't know well enough yet to make fun of for being smelly? Pass.

If Twitter doesn't provide new friends who may cross over into real-world friendship, then what about new friends who stay happily ensconced in the Twitterverse?

Cue a discussion of the law of diminishing returns. I have met a fantastical array of amazing people in my quarter-century or so of kicking around this earth. Many of them I already communicate with almost exclusively on-line, as they're out of the country, or leading busy busy lives, or at least in a distant time zone. But the on-line communication reads as an extension of their personalities, an on-going development of adult relationships which can encompass adult concerns as well as memories of good times in high school or college.

I worry that meeting new folks through on-line media would detract from the attention I can pay to folks I already know without adding substantial social or personal benefits. This worry--or fear, even--relates directly to the overwhelming heaviness I feel every time I consider trying to keep up with daily, or even weekly and monthly publications. There're too many, and they just keep happening. There's never an end in sight.

Aha! I feel a break-through. My fear is not that I will meet new people, but that I won't know when to stop meeting new people. Life just washes over you, again and again and again, without even the brief respite a true tide waning would provide. Shutting off entire avenues of communication, like Twitter, is not a reasonable coping strategy, but it is at least a clear one with easily defined boundaries. Just don't do it.

Call me the anti-Nike, but I do pride myself on having overcome this fear even before I figured out its true nature.

But then, I can't really claim credit for that. Really, despite all my mental bulwarking and hedging of bets, I succumbed to the lure of Twittience for one simple and underwhelming reason: A totalizing lack of resistance to peer pressure.

This one's for you, Miks. Don't worry, I really am enjoying Twitter.