You may not care what I had for lunch, but I do: the value of Twitter

As Gordon Matthewson made clear last week, there’s quite a bit to hate about Twitter. However, the overall benefits and drawbacks of the site notwithstanding, there is no way it’s going away anytime soon. Still, let’s review the all-too-familiar charges that have been levied against this wonderful website before I explain just why it’s worthwhile.

First: Twitter is pointless. It does nothing, adds nothing to the world except more self-indulgent pseudo-introspective graphomania, and god knows we all got our fill of that back in the LiveJournal days. Second: It’s another culprit in the war against the world’s attention span, contributing yet again to the inability of our generation to focus on anything for more than five minutes, or, in this case, 140 characters. Third: Due to the character limit, it’s contributing, like AIM and text messaging before it, to the dissolution of the American language. U, R, OMG, ETC, are the bread and butter of tweeple trying to slip their posts in under the line.

About a year ago, I would have agreed with every single one of these points. Twitter was nothing more to me than a constantly updated Facebook status, forced by the constraints of immediacy to convey nothing more interesting than what people had for lunch. After a year using the site, however, I’m converted, and honestly, some of the people I follow eat some incredible meals. 

I’m not going to even attempt to argue that Twitter isn’t incredibly self-indulgent. There is something absurd about thinking that people want to hear about the details of your day-to-day in the scant detail that Twitter’s limits allow. I’m guilty of this, too: recent tweets from me include “Dreamt I was making out with the cute girl from my class in my closet so no one could see. My closet was bigger, in my dream,” “Gonna watch TNG and drink water to beat this inevitable hangover, then beat off and go to sleep” and a lot of bullshit about being drunk, Star Trek, girls and other nonsense that I don’t even bother telling my friends most of the time. It’s hard to argue that this level of disclosure has any value beyond masturbatory self-indulgence.

That said, one of my best friends was in Ecuador first semester and, as is often the case when separated by thousandss of miles, we weren’t in the best of contact. Sure, we exchanged emails, tried to keep each other abreast of current events of significant importance, but it’s hard to cram an entire life into an occasional 2000 word email. I figured that those months of our lives were just going to be missing from each others consciousnesses, which, while unfortunate, is the way it goes when people travel. On her return, however, I was surprised by how many of the apparently unimportant details of my life she was familiar with. It soon came out that she had been stalking me on Twitter for the entire time she was gone, listening to me bitch about girls, talk about how psyched I was on rock climbing, and describe, in detail, the poops I had been taking. And yeah, it probably isn’t important that a stranger knows that much about my life but, as she said, following my Twitter feed was actually the best way to know what was up with me.

It makes perfect sense, actually. There’s something conversational about Twitter. My feed, and those of many of the people I follow, are full of simple things that we’d mention offhand to our friends, or in many cases already did before deciding to throw online as well. That alone, though, an intimacy with old friends now distant, doesn’t completely justify the site. Fortunately, there’s far more to it than that, which Matthewson either isn’t familiar with or simply didn’t feel like addressing. The first time I became familiar with them was at the Bouldering World Cup last summer, in Vail, CO.

The app I use to tweet from my phone, Twitteriffic, has a feature that searches nearby tweets. Generally it shows up with the worst of the web, especially in Colorado Springs: a lot of nonsense about god, occasional comments about weird vampiric sex – basically everything I’m not interested in about the site. At the Teva Mountain Games, however, I found a wealth of information. I soon started searching #Tevamountaingames (the # denotes a searchable topic, and all tweets tagged with it show up in a search) and discovered everything from up to the minute scoring on the climbers to bios on major figures and reports of their previous successes and failings. And while, yes, I would have been able to gather most of that from careful Googling and listening to the play-by-play from the incredibly obnoxious announcers, the immediate accessibility of the information was unmatchably convenient. Likewise, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas over Spring Break, Twitter kept me updated as to shows worth checking out, secret events happening that were being announced scant hours before, and the best places to track down the free beer that was sustaining me through the weekend.

Obviously, then, there’s more to Twitter than just hearing about a stranger’s lunch, but that’s not what is going to keep this site around. Being an effective method of conveying information isn’t enough to sustain something; if it were, newspapers wouldn’t be dying out nationwide. There are two incredibly unique features that Twitter provides that elevate it to the essential. First, and probably least recognized, is entertainment. Like everywhere else on the internet, Twitter allows you to create the exact persona, present exactly the information that you want to have heard. Some more creative users of the site have taken advantage of this to craft intricate indentities, real or not, that are infititely entertaining. A personal favorite of mine, @Snakebro, presents the life of an alcoholic, drug-addicted 33-year-old pizza delivery guy from Santa Cruz, CA, in incredibly succinct, completely absurd, and occasionally poetic detail. I doubt my life is actually improved much by following him, but I look forward to his new tweets more than new episodes of any TV show I watch regularly. Another one of these accounts, @shitmydadsays, recently got optioned as a television show, starring William Shatner. It’s hard to argue the cultural relevance of something like that.

While that’s the main reason I personally love the site, it’s still not the reason Twitter will survive. Its primary appeal for the mass culture has its roots in the cult of celebrity that America has created. Basically, while no one cares what I had for lunch, 3,483,174 want to know what Kim Kardashian does every day, and almost five million follow Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears. Even lesser-known “celebrities” like all-star comics writer Neil Gaiman have over a million followers. We live in a country that has weekly magazines about who looked best in the same dress at random “events,” that constantly deconstruct the meaning of a text message Brad sent to Angelina; how can it be surprising that the minute details of these larger-than-life figures, presented in their own words, appeal to us? 

There’s even a perceived aspect of friendship that exists in the interactions between tweeting celebrities and their followers. It’s one of the reasons I love Simon Pegg’s twitter feed; he will randomly start jokes based around movie title puns and then retweet the best ones in his own feed. The feeling of gratification when someone you admire, especially a comedian, decides your jokes are worth publishing for all his myriad followers to see is, I assume, incredibly gratifying. I have never been clever enough to find out for myself. It goes farther than that though, as celebs ask for everything from outfit advice to help choosing the next single off their albums from following fans. It is, for better or for worse, a community; one which seems strange from the outside, sure, but there’s a lot of appeal in knowing what your favorite bands are doing when not on tour, or even what they thought of the show they played for you the night before.

Like it or not, a lot of the world happens on Twitter now. It’s a secret world, an interconnected social network that has a lot to offer if you seek it out. I personally don’t want to relinquish the up-to-the-minute climbing news that I get from it, nor do I want to let go of the occasional awesome pictures I find in a #climb search. Likewise, I actually kind of like knowing what my friend the chef in San Francisco is making for dinner any given night; often I find it inspiring when cooking my own meals. And hey, I like the anonymity of it. I got in trouble with some friends a while back because I forgot my Facebook wasn’t Twitter, that people actually read it, and got yelled at for a week straight for making a disparaging comment about the decrease in pretty girls at Colorado College. I’m not going to start referring to “my tweeps,” and I doubt I’ll be attending any “tweet-ups” any time soon, but I’ll definitely keep talking about poop on the internet. Fortunately for me, it seems pretty unlikely that I’ll be without a platform to do so any time soon, because Twitter isn’t going anywhere. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make a tuna melt with brie and avocado, maybe have some chips on the side.