Richard McComb: To tweet or not to tweet
It will be no loss to microblogging, but I have tweeted my last.
For perhaps half a year I have been a keen user of Twitter, updating followers with “in-time” information about what I am eating, what music I am playing and my voting preferences for X Factor. But I’ve grown tired. Tired with being scripted, with being nice.
It’s against Twitter etiquette to slag off other users but over recent weeks several have got up my nose. They exude a clubbiness, an “in-the-knowness,” that I abhor in everyday life. Why have I put up with this behaviour on Twitter because in the real world I’d tell these new media sycophants to sod off? I know I should “unfollow” the irritants, but I never get round to it. I just sit there, looking at my computer, watching the drivel come in.
Ever since I threw in the towel, I have experienced a tremendous sense of freedom, a surge of post-Twitter empowerment. I no longer feel obliged to see what Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton or Serena Williams are up to. I’m not even sure who they are. I followed Kim Kashardian for months, thinking she was courting Lewis Hamilton. Apparently, she wasn’t. That was someone else.
Using Twitter, I realise, was an attempt to fill a void in my life; it’s a void many of you may share in the workplace; and it is this: no one talks any more. Not really. There’s the occasional outburst of jocularity, when someone sneezes, but other than that the corporate landscape has become one of silence.
Everyone’s too busy, too stressed. I’m not advocating mindless gossiping or seeking to impinge productivity. But I just don’t think people talk enough to each other; and the victim, other than sanity, is creativity. Talking creates ideas, which creates innovation. We need to get out of the industrial bunker.
Pinging messages on Twitter has become a second-rate way of keeping in touch. We don’t “lunch” any more and tweeting has become a way of making contacts and reaching out. But at the end of the day, it’s a facile exercise in human connection and I’m bailing out.
While tweeting, I came across some nice people (in reality, they may have been serial killers), and I’ll miss them. But I’d rather meet in the flesh, share a drink, and forget the world of sanitised 140-character communication.
