Warning: Compulsive Twittering can make you a twerp

Perpetual tweets on the Twitter social network can perturb your followers, clog the info-pathways and waste everyone’s time.

By Hannah Williams
Nov. 21, 2008

Twitter’s 140-character tweets enable users to share information – short and sweet, but many Twitterers, intrigued by the voyeuristic nature of the social network, abuse their privilege and instead create the confusion, clutter and consumption that is Twitter.

 “Twitter users opt in to following the ‘tweets’ of the individuals or organizations from whom they want information – you follow the messages from the people you want to follow,” said Janna Anderson, director of a research project called Imagining the Internet.

 The flow of information, however, is hard to tap into (as you can only search people by email or Twitter name) and overwhelming to follow (as people tweet simultaneously about every aspect of their lives). 

“It’s called ‘microblogging’ because some people use it just to inform their friends about what they are doing minute-by-minute, for instance writing things like, ‘I just voted for Obama, and now I’m headed over to Starbucks to get my free cup of Election Day coffee,’” said Anderson.

 News flash: No one wants a play-by-play of your life. Even if you lead an extraordinary life and exercise the pithiness and wit enough to attract a multitude of followers, your compulsive tweeting perpetuates the time vacuum that is Twitter. 

“Twitter is massive waste of time,” writes Publishing 2.0 creator Scott Karp, a self-proclaimed recovering Twitter addict. “Let me immediately qualify that — it’s not that ALL of Twitter is a waste of time. It’s that TOO MUCH of Twitter is a massive waste of time.”

 Twitter could be a potentially useful info-sharing tool, but too many people create noise that impedes the communication exchange.

 “[T]he noise to signal ratio is WAY too high,” as is the impulse to tweet just to tweet, explains Karp.

 “It allows you to follow the information shared by interesting people you don’t even know and they are sometimes sharing extremely useful data,” said Anderson. 

 Key word: sometimes. Even the tech and media experts Anderson follows tweet haplessly about their day-to-day experiences and engage in Twitter-moderated conversations with other users.

 “The nature of networks means it’s impossible to ever follow everyone who the people you’re following are following — because then you’d have to follow the people those people are following, and the people THOSE people are following (and before you know it, you’d be Scoble — and few people have that superhuman capacity). So it’s guaranteed, by definition, that your Twitter feed will be filled with half conversations,” writes Karp.

Karp compares Twitter to social networks like Facebook and MySpace, defining them as “socializing on steroids, round the clock, always on, with no limits or boundaries or clearly defined utility.”

Social media are not inherently bad, but can be a major distraction from more important, more pressing activities, if the user overloads on mediated interaction at the expense of living.

 Obsessive twittering is mutually detrimental, preventing both parties from experiencing real life, as they are either slavishly tweeting or following, removed from reality and living through mediated platforms.

 Moral of the story: think before you tweet. Be respectful of the network, other Twitterers and your followers. Would you want to read your tweet?

 Karp writes that Twitter is a fun, easy and interesting – but not indispensible – web tool. “I got addicted to Twitter, and then tried seeing if I could live without it. And I did just fine.”