Cultivating Boredom

I’ve just about had it with Twitter.

For years, people complained that Facebook was just a popularity contest and that the whole point of the site was to amass virtual friends. I never bought this argument. In my experience, people who use Facebook use it as a social community to help them connect and organize events. Nobody ever pays much attention to anyone’s friend count and, contrary to many people’s uninformed beliefs, Facebook users do know the difference between Facebook “friends” and real life friends.

Twitter, though, feels exactly like the popularity contest that Facebook is accused of being. On a Twitter page, the followers/following numbers are displayed conspicuously under the name like a high score in an arcade game. And unlike Facebook, quite a few Twitter users do try very hard to collect the most followers.

The problem is that these people who get more and more followers start to develop this false sense of importance. They start “putting on a show” for their followers and trying to be internet celebrities. This is particularly annoying when the people in question actually are internet celebrities (Webcomic artists, I’m looking at you).

You might argue that the same could be said for blogs, and I wouldn’t disagree. Bloggers and Tweeters often have the came narcissistic presumption that people actually care about the mundane details of their lives. However, blogs tend to be filled with real content. They’re full of meaty, wholesome writing with a topic and a purpose as opposed to the vacuous one-liners packing Twitter’s databases.

I guess I’m just sick of the “hey-look-at-me-i’m-cool” attitude that seems to go with the site. Hopefully that will die out rather than thrive as Twitter becomes a “Big Thing”.