Paul Burri: Twitter Is for Twits
http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/020710_paul_burri_twitter_is_for_twits/
By Paul Burri, Noozhawk Columnist
It only serves to foster feeble attempts at communication
In order to not be like my children, who when they were little didn’t like certain foods even though they had never tried them, I recently decided to join Twitter to see what all the fuss is about. Now that I have tried it, I think that — like lutefisk, poi or kimchee — I don’t think much of it.
For those of you who have not yet had the “privilege” of sending or receiving a tweet — a Twitter message — let me explain that it’s a free Internet instant communication system that allows you to send and receive short messages limited to 140 characters, such as “Hi. What’s up?” or “Not much. How about you?”
If you believe this is communication between two people, I can say only that Twitter is for you. For me, it’s akin to waving to my neighbor as he drives past my house. Or nodding to my other neighbor as he walks his dog by my house. That’s recognition, not communication.
I read somewhere recently that about 50 percent of college freshmen need to take a course in remedial English because they are unable to spell correctly or understand even the simplest of literature samples.
Jay Leno asked a young man recently, “Who wrote Handel’s Messiah?” The man answered, almost proudly, “I don’t read books.” I suspect Leno was talking to a Twitterer — or whatever they call themselves. It’s a pretty sad commentary about our educational system.
Akin to tweets are what I call “re-mails.” Those are the e-mails I keep getting from one old friend of mine who simply forwards on to me the e-mails he has received from someone else. I suspect that my friend considers that he is communicating with me by doing that. That is, until I notice I’m receiving the e-mail only because I happen to have just one of 147 other e-mail addressees to which he is forwarding stuff.
Years ago, shortly after I had moved to California from New York City, I used to write three- to four-page letters (yes, handwritten) to my several friends who were still living in New York City. I would address the letter to one of my friends, and after he read it, he would pass it along to the others. Apparently they were of interest to them because they passed them along each time. But I never received letters in response.
One day, a few years later, I called one of them — this was in the days when a long-distance phone call was expensive and a big deal — and he mentioned he wasn’t much for writing letters and that whenever he wanted to keep in touch, he would just call.
It was only after I hung up that I realized, “Hey! He never writes me, but he never calls me either.” That was the day I stopped writing to my friends in New York City.
Maybe one of these days he’ll tweet me.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/020710_paul_burri_twitter_is_for_twits/