People who disdain Twitter tend to assume that its users are too lazy to formulate a substantive statement, so they do the easy thing: they burp out little textual emissions whenever something pops into their usually vacant heads.
Many defenders of Twitter resent the suggestion that it's trivial. I mostly resent the suggestion that it's easy. Tweeting is hard. More broadly, status updates, blogging, presenting a version of yourself for mass consumption online is hard. Part CV, part stand-up routine, part cocktail party patter, online interaction is a gauntlet – especially for introverts. Indeed, despite suggestions in the 1990s that the internet might be a place where the shy, awkward, and unattractive could share their inner beauty in an egalitarian utopia as blind as justice, it turns out that online self-presentation is in many ways even more fraught than conference mixers and frat parties. (The tip of the iceberg: mistakes last forever and you can’t go home.)
Read the rest at www.themarknews.com
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.