I hate you, twitter

I'm mad at twitter.

Background: I got "roped" into twitter by friends who insisted that I join twitter to promote my book and other writing. They said the same about facebook and myspace and, and, and....

My claim: There is no quicker and more effective way to self-importance than having your vacuous drivel published on the internet. These online communities are all about making important the person with the most free time.

My problem with twitter: Twitter promotes the inflation of people's realities, and I feel that it engenders one-upmanship. With a blog, for instance, it would take some effort to hyperbolize your life consistently and substantiate it by hyperbolizing all the other elements of the story. On twitter, however, it's a non-comittal sort of thing. It doesn't take much thought to say "had dinner with Woody Allen" (when in reality you went to the Cheesecake Factory with your toothless mother-in-law) because you don't have to make up the story about how this came about. And it's lying in isolation. People are less likely to lie when they have to make up tons of other lies to support the central lie.

Context is the essence of any image; when you see something and you don't know the back story or the moment-to-moment reality, you can never really understand what it is you're seeing. Take for instance, someone I know whom I am (was!) following on twitter: he's a ginormous nerd for all intents and purposes, last time I was spending time with him he was sleeping where he worked because he didn't have a car and no one would drive him home, and was what some folks call a "wigger" (I'm sure this is on urban dictionary or wikipedia, if you don't know what it means). I didn't have a problem with his lifestyle or his nerdiness. Yet, on twitter he's fashioned a personality for himself that would enumerate him amongst the glitterati.

You might ask: why do you care? BECAUSE it makes those of us who are living *actually* amazing lives a little less sparkle. It spits in the face of my cosmopolitan, multilingual, manicure-getting, sexy-boyfriend-having, jet-setting, big-tit-having, egomaniacal reality.

So, am I proposing that if your life sucks you shouldn't have any free, online life-enhancer of any kind? not a place where you can create fairy tales about your greatness to salvage some part of your humanity?? that you should just wallow in your achievementlessness???

Yes, I believe I am.