A half arsed Twitter suicide note

on Mar 15 in General by

The problem with watching Sound of Music is that the kids are now convinced that we’re about to be arrested by the Nazis.

I started writing this post with the intent to do two versions of the above statement. One under 140 characters and one four or five sentences long. I was then going to go into a diatribe about how I was finding twitter is killing my urge to blog, and how much more expressive and creative you can be in a blog post.

Except… I can’t actually come up with four or five sentences that sound quite as good, humorous, or succinct as “The problem with watching Sound of Music is that the kids are now convinced that we’re about to be arrested by the Nazis.”

Bugger.

In fact I’ve actually got 19 characters left over and I can’t really find a use for them.

But still the fact remains, twitter is killing my blogging.

It’s not the only thing that’s killing it mind you. Hadrian’s Walk stuff, the Midnight Movie Club, and the ridiculous expectation my employers have that I turn up to work now and again are playing their part too. But twitter is like a tiny parasite leaching my time and my creativity.

Time once was that if some thought or idea tickled my fancy then I’d make a mental note of it and then try to weave it into a post later. These days I just slap together 140 half baked typo ridden characters and press enter.

If blogging is cocaine then Twitter is crack. They both are addictive but the feedback rush from Twitter is more immediate but also shorter lived. And ultimately I think it’s more destructive. I’ve certainly found myself watching tweets roll in on my phone while I should be be playing with the kids, listening to what Kerry is saying to me, or trying to change lanes on a busy motorway.

And I’m not even that much of a hardcore user. I only follow 140 people. God knows how the people who follow four or five hundred cope with it all.

So I’m withdrawing from the crack and I’ve deleted my twitter app from my phone.

I’m not quitting altogether mind you. It’s far too useful a platform to communicate with friends, share links, and generally shoot the shit. Also, perhaps cynically, I’m keeping it because it’s probably going to end up as being part of my strategy for fundraising for Hadrian’s Walk (or should that be #hadrianswalk).

So Tweetdeck will still be installed on my laptop and I’ll have it running in the background whilst I’m peeing around on the net (which is still a good two or three hours a day on average). But I’m hoping to reduce it’s presence in my life.

So there you go. A post which is probably of no interest to anyone but myself. But that’s the beauty of blogging – you can ramble if you wish. No one bloody reads it, but you can ramble.

Related posts:

  1. Twitter killed the blogging star?
  2. Pomposity and Twitter
  3. A note for all burglars
  4. Sticky Note Experiment
  5. The secret diary of Amy Hughes, aged five and a half

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