KyleSorkness.com

“I finally caved in and joined Twitter…”
-Kyle Sorkness, September 9, 2008

I can tell you what I was probably thinking on September 8, 2008, before that first tweet of mine.

“I don’t need another website wasting my time away.”

“Who wants to read what everyone’s doing all the time, anyway?”

“How is this any different from Facebook status updates?”

“Well, maybe I’ll just give it a try. Maybe tomorrow.”

More than a year has passed, I did join Twitter, I see the usefulness of it, I see the pointlessness of it, and I still have my sanity. For someone with 332 tweets, I certainly haven’t gone overboard and haven’t tweeted as much as many who have caved in. Part of the reason for that is that I have synced my Twitter account with my Facebook profile status. People tend to update their Facebook status less frequently than most tweeters tweet, so I’ve cut back on feeding my Twitter “followers” for the sake of my Facebook “friends.” And yes, I realize how ridiculous that sounds.

If you’re already on Twitter, you probably understand what it’s all about. For those of you who aren’t (hello, group 1 family member), allow me to explain what I believe to be the usefulness of Twitter in 140 characters or less:

“Twitter allows me to connect on day-to-day personal levels, easily share online doings, and get the most recent information possible.”

With Twitter, I follow friends, family members, bands, techies, businesses and organizations, churches and church workers, and others tweeting about things that interest me. On the flip side, others are following what I tweet about. It’s a great, easy way to see what everyone’s doing, be informed about what’s going on in the world, share thoughts, and get questions answered.

Sometime after syncing Twitter to Facebook, I also synced it to this website. As you can see, a few of my recent tweets show up in the sidebar (unless my website has changed since this writing). Until now, I also had my website set up so that blog posts of my tweets would be created weekly. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the few “real” blog posts were soon overrun by posts of Twitter updates. Needless to say, I’ve stopped Twitter from making blog posts. If you really want to see what I’m tweeting about, just follow me (www.twitter.com/kylesorkness). If you’re one of the 4 people who was reading this blog before it was taken down for revamping and want to see what I was up to while it was down, you can view all my previous tweets on my Twitter page, too. Or, if you’re really weird, you can download a 36-page PDF book of all my tweets to date HERE (are you stalking me?).

So I’ve talked about the benefits of Twitter, but what about the dark side? Well, for one, I fear that just like many other things in our culture, Twitter is shortening our attention span. With updates limited to 140 characters or less, thoughts are compressed from a writing standpoint and everything is short and sweet from a reading standpoint. Reading Twitter updates is like going through a bag of candy. You can quickly eat what you like and skip whatever doesn’t look appetizing at first glance. This junk food mentality leaves little to no room for in-depth insights, meaningful analysis, or even proper spelling or grammar. (On that last note, HERE‘s a short article on Chris Pirillo‘s website about the degradation of the English language online that I’ve been saving in my “To Blog” folder for quite a while.) On the topic of this shortened attention span, Biola University posted a great article to their website called “Prayer for Generation Tweet,” which talks about the effects of this on young people’s prayer lives (it’s worth reading, by the way). To quote the article:

“It’s a kind of grandiosity: People should know and care what I’m up to. It cultivates a false self and patterns communication away from honesty,” Pickett said. “Private prayer would be unsatisfying to someone conditioned to want to be famous within a small circle. Who wants to go to one person whom you can’t see to honestly deal with your true self?”

This leads me directly into my second point about Twitter’s dark side: also like many other aspects of our current society, Twitter has the potential to make us even more self-centered than we are already. This is probably exemplified by the use of the term “followers” to label those who subscribe to your updates. There’s a certain emotion attached to reading that you have x number of followers or getting an email notification that “Soandso Smith is now following you.” Once, when I read such an email aloud, a nearby friend replied saying, “I need to get Twitter. I need to get followers.” That being said, I think that it’s importance to notice my use of the word “potential.” Twitter is a tool, and as with all tools, a lot depends on how you use it. As Uncle Ben says, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

All this being said, I do think that I disagree with one of these bashes to Twitter and our constant communication. Looking back at the quote I pulled from the Biola article, notice the line, “It cultivates a false self and patterns communication away from honesty.” While I think that it is possible to use new social media to fabricate a false self, I tend to see the other side of the coin – I think that Twitter, Facebook, and all this communication is making us more honest and is painting a truer picture of who we are. I could go on about this, and I will, but I think I’ll save it for another blog post. Consider this a teaser…or a warning.

So what are your thoughts? Leave a comment below (or, in the spirit of this post, perhaps you should send me a reply on Twitter). To tweet, or not to tweet – that is the question.