on twitter

A few weeks ago I signed up for Twitter. This might not be news worth telling and yet I do. It is my impression that blogging and twittering go hand in hand, and that bloggers are generally expected to twitter as well. To me, the connection has never been clear and it still isn't. The reason I signed up was not to broadcast short sentences to the world, and my status updates, all two of them, reflect that.

The first says something like "b5foan is on twitter". I typed it to test my account right after signing up to the London School of Economics' twitter feed, which announces the exact time of first availability of tickets to public lectures held there. LSE has the most spectacular line-up of speakers in the fields of economics, politics and philosophy, and most talks, though free, require tickets, which sell out quickly.

Recordings of the talks can be downloaded in full a fews days after each event, so not much is lost if you don't go – except you can't ask brilliant questions to kick-start your career as a think tanker like Ayaan Hirsi Ali did in the Netherlands. I can easily imagine working at a think tank, yet I've never attended any of the LSE talks. They're quite a ways away and I'm inevitably too late for the tickets, despite being updated by twitter.

My second tweet notified the world that I'm using Moblin on my Eee. This was true at the time, when I ran Moblin off a stick and had to do something to test the wireless connection and the build-in social networking setup. All worked fine, though I didn't like the look and feel of the operating system and never installed it. The status update will nevertheless remain for the foreseeable future. It won't change because I don't see the point of twitter, though it other day, walking to the gate to catch my plane to Berlin, it nearly came to me.

"Heathrow Terminal 5 is not all that it's cracked up to be" was what I felt like saying. Looking at it through the tired eyes of an early morning rise and willfully ignorant of all the hype that surrounded its opening, I saw just another airport terminal. It might look nice and airy, and it certainly is clean and efficient, but so are many other airports in the world. Compared to the other terminals at Heathrow, Five is certainly as many steps forward, but taking the other terminals as standard doesn't say much.

However, the terminal made enough of an impression on me that I thought about working my thoughts into a blog post. But after endless wanderings through the tax-free section in search of a last-minute gift for my uncle, I gave up. There was no context, there was no story, there was nothing to tell. As I purchased overpriced biscuits from the Harrods outlet, I realized that no context, no story and nothing to tell is exactly what Twitter is. Why is it so big then?

TIME purports to solve that mystery in last week's issue. The author rambles cursorily about how Twitter facilitates instantaneous communication, how it connects people more directly than email or the telephone, how it can pull a most diverse audience into a discussion. The last point was nicely illustrated by some obscure future of education conference that became big after the participants twittered away while discussing in a subdued conference room. Before the day was over, comments and suggestions from across the world were pouring in.

This sounded cool, but at the moment, 90% of tweets are apparently generated by 10% of the users, mostly narcissistic celebrities stroking their vanity who have nothing to say, no story and no context. Most tweets are superficial, pointless blurbs, and I really don't see what I would gain from following any, or posting myself. The constant updates, more frantic than the blogs' I follow, require the state of permanent distraction that I fight each day on my desk. I can't read something new every thirty seconds and keep working efficiently, and I don't want to assault my brain with ever more vacuous information.

The biggest flaw of all, though, is that you have to be connected to some sort of device to transmit your thoughts. Mine usually well up when I've just disconnected my computer or turned off my phone, or when I'm walking through an airport and typing a message is the last thing I want to do. It would be much better if I could beam a thought directly from my brain to Twitter and from there, less directly, in the heads of my contacts. I'm thinking what Twitter needs to really kick ass is a direct brain interface. That's also what my latest tweet says, though I had to type it myself.