Tweeting About Twitter... Narcissism... Reality?

Every day I am amazed at how many people have and are getting Twitter. Phenomenons like this [even blogging] just seem to sweep across everyone's computers. I read a great blog, though, a couple days ago, about Twitter, and I think some of the comments about Twitter are right on. As with anything, there are good things about Twitter--I'm not saying there aren't. But I do think that as students of our culture we need to be taking closer looks at what we so blindly take as good and meaningful, and look at the holistic affects there can be on our lives.

My favorite parts:

"Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.

And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives. The moment-by-moment answer to what is, in Twitterland, the most important question in the world: What are you doing? Or, to save four characters: What you doing? Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin. Quicksilver turns to amber.

Are you exhausted yet?

...using Twitter presents us with the possibility of a social reward, while not using it presents us with the possibility of a social penalty - and the possibility of a reward or penalty is a far more compelling motivator than the reality of a reward or penalty. Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking?

What used to happen in the privacy of the mind is now tossed into the public's bowl like so many Fritos. The broadcasting of the spectacle of the self has become a full-time job. Au revoir, Jean Baudrillard, your work here is done.

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

...As the physical world takes on more of the characteristics of a simulation, we seek reality in the simulated world. At least there we can be confident that the simulation is real. At least there we can be freed from the anxiety of not knowing where the edge between real and unreal lies. At least there we find something to hold onto, even if it's nothing."

I think there really are some great points made. Even as I've sat and pondered getting Twitter before, the thoughts that come into my head really are so self-conscious: "If I get Twitter, people will know what I am doing--that's worth something, right? I won't be out of the loop, I'll know what's going on with people. I want to be in the know. I should to be in the know. And I want people to know about my life, too." And this is even first assuming that people will even look at my Twitter page to begin with. In a time where everyone is so busy, where there is no time left, why are we adding something else to remove us even more from the reality that we really live in--the human part of us? Why are we looking to one more thing to bring us a sense of identity, even in the smallest of ways? I don't at all want to vilify Twitter, but I just want to ask questions of our use of some technology in the first place. There's not necessarily anything inherently wrong with Twitter, but how are we using it?