Twitterpated – or not
(To see the earlier Blogs, Page Down)
Everybody, it seems, is doing it. From the top – our president – to elementary school kids. I wish the president didn’t. It’s undignified. He’s accomplished a lot of good things in 3 years. But what is it that gets the notice, the focus? It’s his tweets! For goodness sake, how insane is that?
Every human’s brain works continuously. Thoughts in, thoughts out, ideas bursting in, revelations and plans exploding in the head, often when we should be sleeping, but that’s a different topic. We can’t stop these thoughts. Some should send us running to the confessional, or shouting to the devil to get out. But, all these thoughts, weaving in and out, are not intended for sharing, or judging. Before Twitter we processed these thoughts, filtering, mulling, thinking. If occasionally one brain child persisted, we refined it, then we talked to a real person about it, hashed it out, we said. We wouldn’t just spit out a hash tag for every thought that entered our brain. We’d be careful how we phrased it, concerned for how it would be received and perceived. But now, here they all are, those unrefined thoughts, twittered for the world using words and phrases we’d never use face to face. And the problem with that is, when they are read, they are often interpreted in a way that wasn’t intended. How can anyone know what the writer intended when hash tags interrupt every thought? The thoughts are not edited, words misspelled, feelings and emotions are hash. Hash tags, i.e. It’s middle school gossip notes, sent locker to locker, hurting anonymously, no apology; send in the clowns.
The other problem with Twitter is, it’s addictive, just as electronic games and Facebook scrolling are addictive. All addictions – drugs, pornography, food, whatever it is – are destructive. They destroy relationships, abilities, and health, replacing our focus, our energy, and our precious time that should be spent with people and projects we love; things we loved before Twitter. I read an article last week about a school that took away the students’ cell phones as they were a distraction to learning. (They were surprised?) Students had meltdowns at school without their cell phones; some claimed a mental health day. Fourth graders had panic attacks. Can you believe this? It wasn’t preschoolers saying bye-bye to their blankies. Panic attacks because they couldn’t be separated from their cell phones in 4th & 5th grades. A 7th grader tweeted, using atrocious adjectives, that he was going to kill his principal for taking away his life line.A large portion of any sports program is devoted to airing tweets. If you wanted to get a professional, knowledgeable synopsis of a sport, why would you want it from Twitter, someone’s lame or uninformed opinion? Why bother to watch the professional commentators?
This is where we’ve come with this. Twitterpated with Twitter, everyone has a platform, unedited, uninformed, unhealthy, and dumbed down. Maybe I would sell more books, but I think tweeting is best left to birds and smoke alarms.