We are all aware of Twitter and peoples opinions of it are pretty black and white. You either hate it or love it. I for one hate it and will explain why but I find myself contradicting my views already simply by writing on this blog because after all Twitter is merely a micro-blog. My only justification for writing this is that it has meaning while Tweets about just arriving at work or having a doctors appointment are meaningless.
We are curiously entering a day and age when actually human contact is not needed nor is it necessarily wanted. We are friends on Facebook with people we have never met in person and we text our best friends more than we actually talk to them. And with most of our communication being via text, email, Facebook chat, or Tweet we are losing our ability to communicate in person. Case in point, look at most teens when they are out on a date, they sit there in silence and just stare at their food or date. If it were socially acceptable I'm sure they would text their date from across the table. Another example would be that now we are more aware than ever of "awkward" situations or silences. But five years ago none of us were doing the awkward turtle, no one was turning their head to their friend and whispering "awkward" when there was a prolonged silence. Why has all this changed? Well for one, there wasn't the amount of awkward silence in social settings in the past, back then we all knew how to carry a conversation. And also now with there being awkward silences we don't know how deal with them so now we just make a hand gesture like the awkward palm tree and all is well because now the awkward silence is now the focus of the setting.
Now back to Twitter, the use of Twitter marks the death of friendship. Sure some Twitter users do it for advertising, like bands, ok that's fine. And sure some users still have friends but not many who really care. Just look at how people respond to depressed posts. Like when someone has a status that says "Tomorrow can't come soon enough, today was horrible." And then you get the person's so called friends commenting on it saying "Aw, what happened?" "I hope everything is all right." Can't we realize that if any of these people were really our friends then they would actually call us to find out what was going on and not leave it up to you to respond to them. A little disclaimer is that I am forming this opinion off of Facebook use since I don't have Twitter. We have become reliant on the self affirmation that comes from posting your life on the web. Thus we become Facebook and Twitter exhibitionists and share every detail of our lives in hopes that someone will comment on it and give us the feeling that someone actually cares. One of the funniest things about Twitter is that no one actually cares about what other people are doing. You don't really care to know that your 'friend' found a parking spot, you actually couldn't care less. But you then still insist on putting up a post after you have had the best donut ever. Even though your friends, just like you, don't care. We feel the need to broadcast out lives to the world so that some how our mediocre lives seem worthy of attention.
So what to do now... what we should do is delete our Twitter accounts and stop looking to Facebook to define our relationships. Just the other day, my girlfriend and I were at the symphony and this married couple was sitting in front of use and both of them were checking their Facebook on their phones. Are you freaking serious?! Talk to you wife you idiot, you brought her to the symphony and now your just gonna sit there? And don't update your status to "at the symphony", the only person that cares is sitting right next to you updating their status too. Seeing this very much saddened me, that even romance has lost its place in life to electronic social networking. Later that night that guy probably text his wife to turn of the light on her nightstand since he was trying to sleep. Pathetic.
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