Ok so this is a weird one, but I was watching Good News Week for the first time since the new season, and they were talking about how Christopher Walken is a Twitterholic and apparently his Tweets are really enjoyable and then they mentioned that there is this random YouTube video of him cooking a chicken.
Well I looked and sure enough there is .... so really this is another addition to my list of people have to much time on their hands :)
On that point though, I'm really not into Twitter ... I'm on it but I don't get it. I follow Treena, Nick and Neil Gaiman and truly it spins me out. I love anything that brings me a little further into Treena and Nicks lives because they live so far away, but Neil Gaimans Tweets are random and definitely not directed at me ... so even though I'm a huge fan why should I care, plus he writes somewhere around 50 tweets a day, so who can keep up and who IS he talking too .... ahhhhh. So who is reading Kevin Rudds Tweets? or other famous people who Tweet? what are they gaining, because so far I have not learnt anything interesting about Neil, although I have seen quiet a few more photos of his dog than I ever needed.
Ok rant finished, Christopher Walken, strange! (nothing new there) and Twitter, pointless?
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4 comments:
I'm starting to think that Twitter is my natural habitat, but then that's really situational for me.
My work is extremely isolating--that's just the nature of the beast. There's teaching, but the research and writing aspect is solitary work.
On top of that, the fact that my employment is currently casual means I'm even more isolated, since I don't have office space on campus: I'm working from home except when I have direct contact with students.
So combine that with the intensive nature of the work, and I'm often not seeing another living soul all day.
Twitter stops me talking to the furniture.
But I do think that's a big part of why academics, for example, are partial to Twitter: our work does isolate us, and Twitter gives us contact with others in small, easily read, and easily written doses.
I have heard arguments against it, and they're all legitimate, too. But it works for me--much as Pownce did, and that didn't work for you, either.
As for the celebrity Twitterers, I think people follow them for rather the same reason you follow Nick and me: they want some kind of insight into their daily lives. Of course, with Nick and me, you want that for a different reason. But some fans want to feel a connection to their fave celebs, a kind of pseudo-intimacy. I don't--I'm not interested in my favourite authors or actors daily lives. (And it doesn't sound as though you're getting much out of it, either.)
Of course, some celebrity Twitterers are actually hilarious. Nick laughs himself sick at Warren Ellis (comic-book writer) on a daily basis.
I think that the BIG difference is that a fair number of your peer group also use twitter, so you can get some dialogue going. Mostly I feel when I use it that I am talking to myself .... Which doesn't feel far from talking to the furniture :) also I am not in front of the PC enough that I feel that your and nicks tweets are recent enough to comment on, don't get me wrong, I'm not giving up on it, but it certainly isn't my medium of choice ... Not that facebook is far behind
You're absolutely right. Back when we all used Pownce, before it died, one friend said it was like sharing a virtual office with people you actually liked.
That's exactly why these things work for us: not only is our work isolating, so we like to have the sense that someone's out there, but we're also sitting in front of a computer for most of the day, so there's immediate gratification.
One way I thought Twitter might work for you, though, is that it can pop up on your BlackBerry, so I thought it might be analogous to my SMSing you (something that you've always complained I can't do!).
But, yeah: you need some specific circumstances for Twitter to be good for your mental health.
I do have twitterberry installed, because I thought the same thing (and nick nicely sent me the info about the apps available) maybe I need to try another app because I find it frustratingly slow. I'm used to the fairly instant gratification I get from the facebook app that just gives me peoples status updates... Hmm maybe this evening I will check out some of the other apps and see how they are, and see if I can convert some of my facebook friends to tweeters :)
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