Rands hit it on the money in his excellent post, We Travel in Tribes. Here's the juicy bit, for me, anyway:
Twitter is … a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss.
I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.
Now, how is this ruining my marriage? Funny you should ask. My Lovely Bride, for all her wonderful qualities, has little patience. (I know, I know - those of you who know me well are trying to figure out why she's stuck around for 27 years with me, since I require lots of - um - patient understanding. Some have even called me high maintenance. It's just the power of love, I guess. I'm not about to question that now, however.... I might jinx it!) When we're out-and-about, and I'm sending tweets to folks, she doesn't want to wait for those 140 characters to be typed. She is in "hang with the hubby" mode, not "watch hubby broadcast random facts of our life to a self-selected group of his friends" mode. So we're still, in our semi-argumentative way, working out how to integrate this into our marriage. It's a process. (It took 15 years for her to stop saying "you love that computer more than you love me," so it may be a while.) I'm trying to be less obvious about things, and she's working on understanding it. Twitter is new and different from anything we've had in the online world before, so it is, as a good paradigm shifter should, challenging our conventions and making us actually think about how relationships work.
Not a bad thing, just a thing.
2 comments:
You should Twitter only in the dark of night lest you lose your marriage?!
One thing about your description which is interesting to note with Twitter is that it's not you posting to your "self-selected" group of friends, but rather, those who have *selected you*.
On Twitter, you choose who to follow, so spammy or annoying people can be unfollowed or blocked entirely. This is a unique aspect of Twitter that has helped it grow.
Thanks for the feedback! That's what I meant by self-selected - they choose to follow me, I didn't choose them. Selected or select friends would mean I choose them. Self-selected means they selected themselves, which is how Twitter works.
Guess it wasn't as clear as I intended.
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