Plus, having my work and entertainment and friendships all overlap and interrupt each other every three minutes is just way too distracting. I was losing my powers of concentration and starting to feel totally insane whenever the design I'd stopped thinking about to find an appropriate font I'd stopped choosing to respond to an email I'd stopped reading to look up an insignificant fact got interrupted by someone in another city telling me and all their other followers that their coworkers suck and they are just about ready to gouge their own eyes out. Basically, people just probably shouldn't converse when they're on a computer, as they are in a less-than-human state.
But so it was still a really hard decision to make, and I felt bad for all my friends I was deserting. Honestly, it's probably the closest thing to committing suicide you can do without actually hurting yourself. I felt it necessary to apologize and tell everyone it wasn't their fault; I just didn't want to exist in this environment anymore. I thanked them all for their many kind words totaling fewer than 140 characters; said I hoped to see them in some other, better medium; and then I pulled the plug.
I actually left a note too, via Twitpic, the site that lets you post pictures which show up as links in a Twitter "tweet". But I didn't realize that as soon as I deleted my account the picture would be deleted too, so it actually only existed in cyberspace for a couple of seconds. Here's what it looked like:
I predict it becomes THE cultural icon of this year.
7 comments:
Hey, that's pretty clever!
Sorry you were feeling that way about twitter...I've never actually checked it out but I imagine it's a lot like facebook only with less characters to write.
Do you not feel the same way about a blog?
Dana
No, I've thought about it and I feel there's a distinction. Social networking sites, instant messaging, cell phones... those media are all about the instant dissemination of up-to-the-minute information about oneself which may be relatively empty of content, but should be immediately amusing or entertaining to others, because it demands a quick response from them. That makes their use like a face-to-face conversation. The problem is that it's a conversation, or rather a whole lot of conversations, that are perpetually ongoing and mutually interruptive, and which require you to continue sitting in a chair and get swept up in your own disjointed thought process to the exclusion of the world around you.
A blog is more like a book or a letter: written thoughtfully on one's own time, to be read later by someone else who may or may not respond. In that kind of scenario, it's actually helpful to get lost in one's own head for awhile, where one's thought process is not (in theory) being continuously derailed.
Well, that explains a lot. I think that I too will have to quit it twitter...if only to make use of your AWESOME note! I miss you though. You are/were kind of the only reason I'm on there and Alison isn't saying much now either. Thats it. I twit too.
I twit too!
But I'm still addicted to Facebook. :P
I saw your quit/twit tweetie tweet before your account was destroyed. I think I tweeted back "nooo!" but it was too late.
Thanks for the attempted prevention, uh, Peter? Don't blame yourself. There was nothing you could do.
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