Do any of you, lj friends, use twitter? When I first heard about it I thought it must be social networking for kids between the ages of 10 and 14 because I couldn't think of who else would want to know the moment-by-moment doings of their friends. I imagined the tweets: "listening to avril she's so cool" and "playing grand theft auto for the seventh straight hour".
I'll confess that I joined twitter about three months ago because my two lovely Avondale graduates dolly_monroe and betty_quirk told me that they use it and find it fun. I still wasn't persuaded that it would interest me even though I, of course, loved knowing what the above-mentioned cool chicks were up to. Well, twitter managed to capture my attention for a few weeks because I was obsessed with news about the attacks on Gaza and found the instant updates posted by Al-Jazeera to be informative. Eventually, the attacks died down and so did Al-Jazeera's posts and I stopped checking twitter.
I was reminded of twitter yesterday by my duo of tweeting ex-students and then this morning on the radio CBC's The Current did a story on the use of twitter by politicians. Mayor David Miller was interviewed about his use of twitter and he mentioned that his first tweet ever was about pressing his snooze button. Gag. He didn't even need to be cornered into admitting that he uses twitter updates to make himself look more human to the public. We live in a sad world when politicians don't even have to disguise their use of media to construct a warm and cuddly image for themselves. It's even grosser that people seek out deceptive soundbites and 140-character-fuzzwords when it's not even an election campaign. I resolved then not to follow any politicians on twitter even if, by some miracle, I decide I like them or think they're interesting. I just think the mix of politics and twitter can only make the crooked game of politics that little bit...crookeder.
I am, however, compelled by the idea of using twitter to follow public figures and writers. I would love to know what's on Margaret Atwood's mind at any given moment, although something tells me she won't be tweeting any time soon. I am currently following David Suzuki which has already been helpful since he directed me to a free ebook download about the tar sands. Now I'm just trying to think of some other interesting people who might be on twitter.
The other twitter question on my mind is how long will I hold out before signing up to follow Perez Hilton.