Twitter

There are any of a number of interesting time-wasting gadgets out there, many of which use IM protocols, or cell-phone text-messaging. I see children standing in school yards waiting to be picked up, playing games on their cellphones or portable videogames, rather than talking with their friends or running off energy in play.

Seems everyone has a blog or website, I have several  — a few of which I haven’t been to in months.  As if there is no time in real life to connect with real people, so they spend their evenings and breaks checking in with virtual friends.  Some people, like myself, who are mostly housebound find this connectivity a lifesaver, a way to reach out.  Others seem to use it to avoid life.

I see adults who are so connected that there is virtually no place they are likely to go that they could be out of touch. Walking along hiking trails, I can hear cell phones with their distinctive ringtones instead of the chatter of birds and the rush of the wind in the trees.  Rather like a smoker in a gourmet restaurant…  it ruins the experience, dulls the sensations, prevents the person and many around them from enjoying it.

Still, there are some fun new toys out there.  A rather cute one is Twitter.  But it should come with a warning.

It is an online database-driven gizmo that lets people update their friends, online via a webpage or IM, or via cellphone, at any time of the day or night.  It is nice to be able to see what people are up to throughout the day, to hold short little conversations.

But it can be addictive, as so many things these days.  I notice that some people seem to post every fifteen minutes — or more often — compulsively.  I found myself surfing past on occasion to check the couple of “friends” who visited my twitter page, though I didn’t actually know them.  Fortunately, I don’t use my cellphone for anything but emergency calls, and only a few people I know own cell phones, none of them techie enough to be interested in twitter updates.

I think we all need to consider the conspicuous consumption so rampant in our highly connected, post-industrial world.  Just because some thing  is easy, and available (or free), doesn’t necessarily mean we need to have it.  Just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it’s good for us.

So I stopped posting, removed myself from the public feed, deleted all the people who had decided to follow my feed.  Trying to remember all the places I had links to it so I can remove them.

And simplifying.

And returning the REAL world.