STEPHEN FRY

Hmm, I'll confess I have shied away from Twitter. I'm not a very 'open' type of person, and even hated Second Life, which I've signed up for twice.

I am really into Twitter....cant stop it....saves me texting all the time....but I dont use facebook.

Add me on twitter....Username: BUSAPAR3

As my granny always told me ........'everything in moderation'! x

I recently joined twitter. I'm highly confused by it all and to be honest I'm not sure I can really be bothers to spend the time it will take to get familiar enough with it to make the most of it. I much prefer forums. They move at a more sensible pace and the messages seem more thought out rather than just the random abuse, which seems to make up much of twitter.

One great thing about Twitter though is I found this forum/Blog on it.

I think it's also amusing that when people give examples of why social networking via tech is so great, they almost always use real life examples or are, in fact, speaking of real life ( or 'the meat world' as a friend of mine likes to say ).

The point that some of this stuff is following people home, off work but related to work, is terribly depressing if you're not in some sort of emergency related field ( e.g. medical/law enforcement ). A person should be able to put in an honest days work and then be left alone to enjoy their lives. Instead, employers now feel quite alright about making workers lives more of a hell than they've ever been. Instead of working to live, people are living to work.

Also, most of us just are not nearly as interesting as we think we are, or would like to. That's not undue flaggellation either, it's just true in my personal experience. Even people I know who lead rather charmed and fantastic lives can become dull pretty quickly. Twitter has not improved that

And good gods the marketers have really beat the living crap out of Twitter in particular. I understand salesmen being invasive - up to a point. But with Twitter they can take it to a whole new level.

Finally, I thought I was slightly romanticizing the other people I know who are so removed from anything related to tech - except perhaps related to some form of work - are also the calmest, down to earth, least stressed, and *wise*, ( i hate even using that word in this case i admit ), I know. And I'm sorry, but I do not think that's a coinicidence anymore. You call it 'rose colored glasses' all you like, or a fondness for yesteryear. I call it observation and leave it to others to place it in Time.

FWIW, I've never had any desire to live in the olden days, because as it's already been mentioned, there are improvements that have been made that, comparitively speaking, gives us lives of ease. That includes even twenty years ago. But I don't see Twitter itself, this particular we're talking about, as being any kind of major improvement to peoples lives. In fact, pardon me, before Twitter really 'broke out' and had the huge useage it does now, a couple of people I know who were ardent bloggers, ( and it improved their writing skills immensely compared to some bloggers ), shifted to Twitter not because it's better than blogging or faster or any of that, but because it was the thing to do.

IOW, fashionable. Those who build tech know that this is an important marketing point to capture the consumers with the most flexible spending habits. That analysis changes all the time and is a numbers game I can't think about without wanting to instantly fall asleep.

I go on Twitter occasionally to see what my favorite actors and shit are up to. I'll post something at random, usually in caps and in as sarcastic a tone as I can get across in text, because no one reads my feed anyway.
I sort of treat it like Facebook, if all Facebook had were status updates.

15-20 really good accounts is about as much time as one person can legitimately devote to actually read what's linked and pay attention to what's really being said. If you find five amazing accounts you're set.

Resort to hash lists only for times of chat roulette nostalgia - or if you find misogyny funny, which I don't unless the joke is specifically engineered to be satirical against the people who champion domination scenarios. Only problem then is when people begin to think it's funny by nature, without bothering to consider the underlying inferred solution toward the problem or at least identify the causes it arises from so the joke is revelatory about the perpetrator or society. Usually it's gender politics.