Twitter

I'm not a really big fan of Twitter, IM, etc. - and I'll explain why. It's really simple, but it seems to be missed by many people who are hell bent on explaining how great these things are. And in a way, they are great. So is the telephone. And the doorbell. And all manner of devices and technologies that interrupt people.

I call it Interruptive Technology.

When the pager first came out, all sorts of people were wandering around with pagers - some weren't even actually used. It was a status symbol. When I worked in the Emergency Department of Naval Hospital Orlando, I got saddled with the Shift Supervisor pager. Picture this: you get a nasty laceration so you go to the emergency room. You watch as the person about to suture you up irrigates your wound, sterilizes it and sets up a sterile field so that they can stitch you up. With the suture kit all opened up, the sterile gloves on... you suddenly hear a pager go off. Or worse, it starts vibrating in their pocket and the person about to suture you starts freaking out.

There are times when a person should not be interrupted. I think every shift supervisor tried to kill that pager.

The telephone always rings when you're in the shower. Or when you're in the middle of an amorous moment.

And instant messaging never worked for me - with all the people that know me/I know, I can't deal with a deluge of thousands of, "Hi, how are you?". It's silly and annoying. If you're going to bug someone, cut to the chase.

So then came twitter, which does that to some degree - but why would I have it connected to my mobile phone so that it buzzes all the time?

There's something to be said for the simple things. Like email. You send a message, you read it as needed. I realize that there are times when something important may come up that would require someone's immediate attention. And a lot of these technologies and devices can do that. The trouble is how people use it.

There's a familiar story about a mouse hitting a button, maybe red, to get dosed with cocaine. It does so, consistently, in preference to food and sex.

I prefer to think of the button as being a mouse button. And instead of cocaine, there's the Internet. Some mice have a simple mouse manufactured by an elitist fruit company, but the vast majority of mice have a Swiss knife of a mouse. It's got a minimum of 3 buttons, and one of them scrolls content up and down on a receptacle that, no matter how large, always seems too small. In fact, if there was a way to crawl into the receptacle I imagine the problem with these mice would be short-lived.

But that's the Internet. Publishers are driven through by the number of clicks their content gets and - sometimes - even the quality of the clicks if that makes any sense. Thus, publishers typically cut their content into smaller pieces so that the mice have to click through more links to get their doses of content. Each click is some revenue for the publisher. Click. Click. Click. And the majority of the mice, even hearing the urban legend of how they are just revenue streams for publishers, continue to click no matter the quality or quantity of the content. Click. Click. Click.

The future is made up of realities and choices, and at any given time there are many pathways to it. The choices include the people around you, the actions that you take with them and the actions they take with you - as well as the interactions of the whole mess of that with the realities of the environment as seen by everyone involved... even those not in the 'network'.

Last week I lost a friend who I had known only for a year. He didn't use Twitter or Facebook; he started off herding cows and built a multi-million dollar automotive-related business from there based on risk-taking, sound decisions and most of all - hard work. You could eat on his reputation. In fact, many did due to his generosity. So after losing him last week, knowing that the world was a lesser place without him and also knowing that pathways had closed I considered it all very deeply.

When I posted on it on Facebook, I got messages of support. But no one knew this person, and it almost seems like sacrilege to write about him on these sites because he was more real than the majority of people who follow my doings here, there, or anywhere. When all my other real friends became distant - perhaps because I began to get dirt under my fingernails (how distasteful!) and being as hands on as I usually am while damning the pseudo-aristocracy, this friend was someone who wanted nothing from me. I wanted nothing from him. For both of us in that environment - in this environment - that is a luxury. In a world where people beat on our doors because we're sympathetic and casually empathetic, we allowed ourselves the abuses and pointed out that our weaknesses and strengths were synonymous. While we gave, we never took for nothing and we never leeched others to get what we have or what we wanted... or even what we needed.