Should twitter users be called twits?

Twit: - Slang- A foolishly annoying person. (Definition free online dictionary)

For months I ignored the hype around Twitter. But I'm a sucker for enticing looking boxy spaces which ask me confidential questions. So when the box at the Twitter website cooed like a particularly pleasant dove and invited me to confide in 140 characters: "what are you doing?"... I gave in. And wrote my first tweet: - "Should twitter users be called twits?" "101"--replied the box. (FYI -"101 means the number of characters left.)

I thought my first tweet with its clever pun on the word 'twit’ was great but the rest of the Twitterati decided otherwise. It ignored me. Now if it had been FB or OS I'd have posted a dictionary definition of the word 'twit' as slang (as I have above :) but really there are not many definitions you can write in 140 characters.

I thought of writing another tweet explaining the definition of 'twit' and the pun on 'tweet' but by the time I thought of this 15,000 tweets had already been posted between me and my original thought, so I decided to forgo the follow-up at the risk of looking like a twit myself.

For the next few months I kept answering the cooey dove's question periodically. 'What are you doing" it always asked nosily, but my answers got more and more mundane, and witty one-liners became a thing of the past. Sometimes I did melt and twittered something fluttery. "Do sleeveless blouses show your right to bare arms?" or "Is atheism a non-prophet organization?" But my tweets were just one of the millions being posted by twits like me every minute and I could no longer fool myself that they were all not inane, noisy and useless.

So the relationship between twitter and me became like a promising flirtation dying the slow death of indifference as we realized we did not have much in common. Soon I was retorting shortly in the box "I’m thinking of taking a shower”, then I moved further away to snapping "nothing" and finally I said goodbye (133). There was not much more I wanted to say in 140 characters.

Then I met THE PROPHET!!! .. on IM. As I whined on about the uselessness, selfishness and inanity of Twitter, he thundered --don’t think of what twitter can do for you, think of what you can do for twitter. Umm...right! As if I can do anything for millions of twittering maniacs who ignored me.

But who was I to argue with The Prophet who happens to be a titan in the tech world? So I nodded acquiescence and begged for some more wisdom. And received a stern gospel where words like "useful", "information", others, give links, "good writing" poured forth from his fingers. Enlightenment dawned on me--tweeting was supposed to be knowledge sharing and not fluff and I became a Born-Again Twit. Hallelujah!

Now I tweet daily about useful subjects like sci-fi and floods and trivia, give links to articles on #Time mag and # paranormalactivity, and my twitter life is flourishing. I have a small band of twitterers who follow me and sometimes when they write "@DM: thankyou"...it fills my heart with joy. Sometimes I do feel the irresistible need to post my fluttery useless twits like Octavia Butler's advice on dealing with writers' block? (Fall in love. Why not? You're already miserable.) but I restrain my impulses. I've become a humble soldier of the Twitter revolution and will post only what is best for Twitterdom.


I have only one more thing to add--" TWITS OF THE WORLD UNITE THE FUTURE BELONGS TO US!!"

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