Giving up Twitter

I have decided to give up Twitter. Having adopted it when it was just emerging into general public awareness, I'm now abandoning it just as it seems to be really taking off. There are several reasons for this, which I'll go into in a minute, but first a couple of caveats. This is not in itself a criticism of Twitter: of course it has its faults and shortcomings, but they are not the reason for me to abandon it. Nor is it a criticism of other social networks, the way they are used, or the people who use them. I know several people who are enthusiastic and prolific users of Twitter and Facebook: this is not in any way intended to be a commentary on them or the way they use social networks. This is an entirely subjective point of view and a completely personal decision.

OK, so why give up Twitter?

I have recently had extended periods of not using it, first as a discipline during Lent, and lately I have deliberately not posted (though have read tweets from other people), because I was ambivalent about whether I wanted to post some things. I decided not to post anything and see how that went. The result was that I became more convinced that I could easily manage without Twitter. Of course, millions of people manage without all sorts of things that we take for granted, so I needed some reason why not using Twitter would actually benefit me. At the very least, I wanted to be sure that using Twitter wasn't adding any positive benefits to my life, in which case giving it up would save time that could be used on something more productive.

I'd been ambivalent about tweeting some things (and therefore posting them on Facebook, since that was set up to happen automatically) because ideas, impressions and feelings that were important to me at the time were not necessarily things that I would want to share with a wide group of acquaintances. This meant that I was tending to self-censor things that were genuinely important to me, and was left with my daily trivia and minutiae: what I was eating, where I was going, whether or not I had lost any weight. This is a caricature of Twitter: frequent and regular updates about nothing at all. Did I really want to be broadcasting this stuff? I know there are a few people who like to know what's going on with me, but I'm pretty sure that they don't need every detail - and I have a Facebook account to which I can post as easily as I can tweet, so I wouldn't be cutting off anyone who genuinely wanted to find out what I was doing. As for everyone else, I have to be honest and say that I'm not that fascinating.

Similarly, although I am interested in what my friends are doing, I found that looking at a Twitter stream was becoming more an exercise in skipping through tweets than actually finding anything; Twitter had become a way of using up time, or a distraction when I was putting off dull tasks. I regularly found that I would check Twitter on my phone and feel that I had neither gained anything nor added anything useful. It was not, to use a marketspeak phrase, "adding value". If the time I spent reading tweets could be spent doing something that does add value, or that at least doesn't leave me feeling like I had just wasted time, then wouldn't it make sense to give it up?

Most of the people that I follow I do not know and am unlikely to meet in real life. It's always fascinating to get an insight into someone else's life (which is why so much TV is essentially "look at what these other people are doing") but if I didn't know about what these people are doing it wouldn't actually change my life. Similarly, the organisations I follow have so rarely told me anything that has made a difference to me that losing their tweets would have a negligible impact. If someone starts following me on Twitter, I check their Twitter page, and if it looks like they say things I'd be interested in then I'll follow them. Almost nobody who has started to follow me (and why would you want to, if you don't know me?) has got a follow back from me. I'm sure there's an argument that following someone back is the kind of reciprocal behaviour that makes the digital world go round a little more smoothly, but I simply don't want to know dull details about strangers. Sorry.

Online social networking is an adjunct to real life social networking, not a replacement for it. Having 50, or 500, or 5000 followers on Twitter doesn't make up for having few real friends. Having a few good friends with whom you can talk and share confidences, and a wider circle of friends that you can socialise and have fun with, plus 500 Twitter followers is significantly different from feeling isolated from people and using online networks as a way of masking loneliness. For me, it makes more sense to try and develop closer relationships with people I care about than to have a long list of people who tell me things that don't have any emotional impact at all.

I actively dislike the competitive element of numbers of followers, or indeed the value that is put on having many followers. You don't need to be Ashton Kutcher to be seduced into thinking that 10,000 followers is better than 10 followers, and never stop to question the assumption that "many, more, most" is synonymous with "good, better, best". You don't need to have any self-esteem issues to start feeling like the number of people following you must somehow be related to your interestingness, your fame, your value as a contributor to the global conversation. My most recent tweet, "Steve has nothing to say", was a couple of weeks ago. Two people have started following me in the last three days.

The wider question, whether I do have anything to say, and if so what, how and to whom, will continue to occupy my thinking. I'll use Twitter to send a couple of direct messages to people I know in real life, so that they know they won't be able to contact me that way, and then I'll tweet a link to this blog post. Then, I think, that will be it. If I miss the Twitterverse terribly I can always come back; I don't think I will.

Post-Lent reflection

It's rather more than six and a half weeks since my last blog post, though my Twitter feed has been busy, and I've even ventured into the confusion of another revamp to Facebook. Apart from being glad that Digsby plus Twitter integration means that I don't really need to go on the actual Facebook site, what have I learned?

• Giving up telling people about me was easier than I thought it would be
  
• Not knowing what was going on with other people was harder than I expected. I have got used to knowing what's happening with people since I joined Facebook, but because I never maintained friendships before that, I had no fallback methods (calling round to see someone, phoning them) of finding out what was going on for people.
• Using Twitter and Facebook is self-reinforcing. Having "I'm not using Facebook for Lent" as a status is OK, but in most cases I don't want the last thing I said to be the last thing I say, so I keep wanting to make sure my status is up to date. One tweet leads to another.
• Living online is pervasive; it encroaches steadily on real-world life, so that it's possible to spend increasing amounts of time reporting and reflecting on real-world life online, and then spending even more time reporting and reflecting on online life.
• In a consumer society, there's a strong drive to be interesting or appear important, because that turns me into more of a saleable commodity. If you don't think this is true, consider Facebook not telling you (and everyone else) how many friends you have, or Twitter without the number of your followers in the sidebar.

All this ties into my ongoing thinking on humility and self-worth, and some emrging ideas about how to prioritise stuff in life, which I may or may not blog about sometime soon.

Lenten discipline (more silence)

I've decided to fast from online life for Lent, and as a start I'm going to stop using Twitter and Facebook, and have changed my browser from Flock back to Firefox (and uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter add-ons). I'm also going to try and cut down on the surfing that is purely for distraction, though that may be difficult - how much time spent on BBC News is for keeping up to date and how much is avoiding doing anything else? I also want to try and keep up with writing, which will mean using Helium and Google Docs (as well as research). I will simply have to make sure I draw the line between what's necessary and what's not; I guess that's where the discipline comes in.

Hopefully in about six and a half weeks I'll let people know how it went.

Twitter Grader

This is a bit sad. What's worse is that I look at this and think "How could I get more followers so that I can move up the rankings?" And then I get depressed because I'm less interesting than the Red Funnel Ferry.

No, it's OK, life is not a popularity competition. It doesn't make any difference to my self worth whether 6 or 60 or 600 people choose to be informed about the minutiae of my life. (But if you are reading this and use Twitter, please follow me, please please please)

Thanks to James for the link and helping me realise that the world is, in fact, madder than I suspected.

Geoff and Tom on April

The other day I posted a tweet that was perhaps a little opaque.
Basically I was thinking of this:

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Memory and desire, stirring

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Dull roots with spring rain.

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Winter kept us warm, covering

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

A little life with dried tubers.

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

And smale fowles maken melodye,

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

That slepen al the night with open ye,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

Twitter

You may noticed from the sidebar that I've started using Twitter. I'd put off using it because I really didn't see the point; I still don't see any point to it, but it both fun and incredibly addictive.