This is my 1,707th post. It has taken me six years to write 1,707 posts.<\/p>\n
I have tweeted (on twitter) 1,712 times. It has taken me less than a year to write that many tweets. 1,712 times 120 characters (140 characters allowed per tweet, but I am averaging) is 205,440 words.<\/p>\n
205,440 words! About nothing! I am running in a hamster wheel of Seinfeld episodes!<\/p>\n
I joined twitter when I signed up to be a Canada Moms Blog Blogger. I had a bunch of instant friends; the CMB team, the other writers who belonged to the greater network of the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. I followed them all. They all followed me. After a few months maintaining two blogs, a facebook page and a twitter feed, I realized there was too much of me out there.<\/i> Too many places where I was smiling, standing at the chip bowl, making pleasantries. I was in all different corners of the room during the party and that is not my style.<\/p>\n
There is nothing wrong with that person. I am just not her.<\/p>\n
The Internet has grown around me like a very aggressive garden. Lately I feel like I’m constantly weeding, trimming back over-zealous vines, bush-whacking with a sharp knife that I might see the good again, the small wild flowers trying to find the light, the ivy softening cold stone walls. <\/p>\n
Twitter is a constant battery of starlings in this garden. Protecting their nests, dive bombing when I walk by, and chattering, the constant chattering. I have no use for it.<\/p>\n
Ah, that’s not even it, which is too bad because I like the starling imagery a lot. It’s not that twitter (or those who use it) bothers me. Some judicious following \/ unfollowing and you, too, can see only what you want to see on twitter (or anywhere else on the ‘net.) It’s how I use twitter that bothers me. It’s that I throw these one-offs, these 140 character pieces out into the ether and never see them again. I never dig out the story and I love the story. The story is the thing.<\/p>\n
Of course, I could do that. It’s not twitter’s fault that I don’t. I guess it comes from being a different kind of processor. An internal processor. <\/p>\n
Let’s put this in the language of reality TV. At the beginning of the day I have 5 bags of chips to give out. One goes to the kids. One goes to SA. One goes to me. One goes to the house \/ to writing \/ to slack-jawed drooling in front of the TV. And one goes to the Internet. Will it be twitter who gets the bag of chips? This blog? Someone else’s blog comments? <\/p>\n
Blogging replaced real writing for me because it provided instant gratification. I hate to admit it, but it is obvious. I could work for months on a short story, send it to magazines for months more, hear nothing, start over, spend years. People do. Better people than me. Maybe if I had kept doing that for the past six years instead of blogging I would be published by now.<\/p>\n
Sobering thought.<\/p>\n
As if blogging wasn’t instant gratification enough, tweeting comes along, with gratification even more instant and for far less effort.<\/p>\n
In a perfect world, if I were better organized and disciplined then yes, I could have it all. I could use twitter to my advantage. But right now, twitter is using me. It takes my bag of chips and then I have no bag of chips left for any other part of the Internet. The Internet is hungry!<\/p>\n
First step. Losing twitter, at least for a while. Maybe someday, if I have twelve bags of chips a day, I can take it back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is my 1,707th post. It has taken me six years to write 1,707 posts. I have tweeted (on twitter) 1,712 times. It has taken me less than a year to write that many tweets. 1,712 times 120 characters (140 … Continue reading