Recently I’ve been thinking about the concept of microblogging. Pretty much everybody online does it: Twitter is very common, but even Facebook status updates are a type of microblog.
In particular I have been thinking about how we try to write the things we do into something “interesting”. Life is rather boring, most of the time, and we don’t ever write about the things that are uninteresting, instead we may spice it up with funniness or in other ways make it less boring sounding.
Many people have told me that they think Twitter is just inane things like “Thinking about picking my nose”, but even if we discard the generalized fact that they haven’t actually tried it out, I think we miss the point if we try to defend Twitter by saying that interesting things do exist. I think we miss the point because of this: Normal conversation is pretty similar.
In conversation we don’t normally talk about things that we don’t think are interesting. If I’m talking to my room mate, we probably won’t talk about how I sat in my chair for several hours and pretty much did nothing. Instead we will talk about the things that are interesting: I found this video of Epic Beard Man, and examined the design of an interesting single page web. Even so, normal conversation is filled up with what could likely be called inane chatter.
So what does it mean, that we don’t talk about boring things? I don’t know, actually.
There’s an old saying that a person is more than the sum of the parts, but that isn’t to say the parts aren’t important. Since a lot of life is pretty boring, and we don’t talk about the boring things, that means we don’t talk about a lot of life.
That’s why I decided to get a Twitter account and only post things which I thought were boring. Things that I probably wouldn’t talk about because they weren’t interesting.
It’s hard, because I’m only used to talking about things that I think may be interesting, but you can read it here: http://twitter.com/normalboring
In the past I tried using Twitter, but I stopped because it didn’t benefit me. In this case I am using it as a sort of study, to see what happens when a person only talks about the inane and boring things in life.
It may just be because we share granola stashes and yards, but I’ve actually found myself edified by your “inane” tweets so far :-x
It’s probably just that you’re my room mate, but I suppose only time will tell.
I think the reason people get upset about the inanities on twitter and facebook (should those words be capitalized? They are proper nouns, but it seems the internet doesn’t like capitalization) is that their presentation is more formal. In a conversation, the rules are very relaxed, wheras the written word commonly carries relatively more weight / meaning. I agree that tw. and fb. are more like conversation, but people still feel the aura of the written word, and get mad when what they read isn’t worth reading.
@William: Those are very good thoughts, thank you. Also, I think it is your choice as to the capitalization of online services–I prefer capitalization, but some sites purposefully spell their company without the capitalization.