I've been sort of avoiding Twitter. I could never see the point, and from what I can see, there is still an ocean of #totalselfobsessedhorseshit surrounding islands of actually quite useful stuff. But on those islands? Wonderful things to discover. I'm old enough to remember the early days of the web, when you never knew where you were going to end up, and everything was actually interesting. Maybe it was because it was relatively difficult, then, to set up a website? Not really. We had a site for our wedding, in 1999. Don't tell anyone, but it was mostly built in MS Word with photos printed from 35mm and scanned, with a sprinkling of Photoshop - the clouds from Windows 98 made an appearance in one photo to replace a typical Irish Summer skyline.
It HAS become easier, though, to publish your views to the world, and now it's rare to find a site that doesn't have a comment stream. So everything is cluttered up by trolls and their victims, and we wonder why things take so long to download. Where they find the time I don't know. Sometimes I find myself getting sucked in to the point where I'm on the verge of feeding a troll myself, which is possibly as pointless an act as one person can perform. And that, to me, was the essence of 'the twitter problem'. Lots of time wasted by twitchy thumbs on smartphones, posting the minutiae of lots of 'fascinating' lives.
And the experience is still weird in some aspects, but that may be just my viewpoint, coming, as it does, from not-quite-the-top-of the tower of middle-age. The fact that complete strangers started following me from the second I logged in - why? I hadn't even SAID anything yet! Weird and 'skeevy' as some of the 'kids' are wont to say on the US TV shows. So I had an account (because everyone else has one) that was effectively dormant. But I had an epiphany around the recent CoderDojo conference. Lots of interesting people have interesting things to say to anyone who will listen, and Twitter gives them as much of a voice as it does to the pop-stars. And it's a huge ongoing conversation that anyone can join without having to wait for a gap in some wind-bags train of thought, or feeling like you're somehow unworthy. Sorry if that seems obvious, but if it does you're probably already a 'Twitterer'; these musings are for someone else's benefit. The big payoff for me though, comes from following people like... well, I'll let you find your own definition of interesting. But they're out there, laying stepping stones through the aforementioned ocean. If you haven't tried Twitter yourself yet, give it a go. Find someone whose opinions you respect, or even someone you never thought you'd listen to. Follow them back to the real reason we used to love the web.
