Twitter killed the internet star.
So by overwhelming demand (Uncle Frank), I’ve decided to re-enter the blogosphere.
A little while back, I had one of these puppies over at the Altpress site. It had a good run, I think. I still have the trophy behind my desk for having the most-read blog of the AP editors, but that’s kind of only because I held that title when we dissolved the blogs. It was either keep the trophy or convert it into a gratuitously complicated ash tray, and I chose the former.
Anyway, I guess the reason the blogs kind of went away has a little something something to do with a certain web phenomenon that nobody was expecting. No, not this one.
I’m talking about Twitter.
We had a pretty good idea that the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but who knew the revolution wouldn’t be more than 140 characters?
Personally, I guess I started to wonder if I could actually hold anyone’s attention with long-winded rants about album art and exploding ovens.
After all, I’m already up to 944 characters here.
And 992 after the sentence saying how many characters I’m up to.
But then I decided that it really doesn’t matter if anyone actually reads this anyway. Kid just needsta write.
And I feel like the thing I wanna vent about is actually related to all of this.
Look, I just don’t like Twitter.
I’m sorry. It’s nothing against the developers. It’s a lovely website. And I’m inevitably gonna use it to pimp the fact that this blog exists anyway.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like it And here’s why:
1. I’m not interesting.
I’m not fishing for compliments here. You’ll know when I am. (Ohhhh, I’m just so ugly…) I’m NOT interesting. Neither are you. Neither is Taylor Swift. (By the way, when did Taylor Swift get 32 feet tall? Geez.)
I don’t really do anything. Seriously. The most interesting thing about me is that I occasionally interview people who are interesting, but I’m not allowed to tweet about that stuff because it would blow the surprise when the stories actually come out. So that leaves me with little else to talk about except lunch and how dirty my hair is.
Yeah, I could update everyone on every single thought I have throughout the day, but I don’t wanna subject anyone to that. Truth is, I don’t wanna know every thought anyone has. I don’t even want to know all my thoughts but I kinda have to because they occur in the same place where I remember where my keys are.
2. I like going off the grid.
Maybe it’s a character flaw, but I have a tendency to want to vanish. I don’t mean that in the Hot Topic-cry-for-help sense of the phrase. You’ll know when I’m crying for help. (I think I’m gonna listen to nothing but Damien Rice today…) I just mean that I like my space (funny that I don’t like MySpace, either). At the risk of sounding like a belligerent 10th grade physics teacher, I remember a time when you had to really make an effort to know what someone was doing. If I wanted to know what my girlfriend was up to, I had to call her—and not her cell phone. I had to call her house and have an awkward exchange with one of her parents first and hope they weren’t lying when they said she wasn’t there. And if I had a full day of college classes, a double-shift at the record store, got drunk at ’80s night at the Beehive, fell asleep on a fire escape and then stumbled back to my dorm, I basically didn’t exist for that amount of time. And I liked that. Now I’d be obligated to provide constant, increasingly incoherent tweets throughout.
3. I can’t really ever listen to The Downward Spiral the same way again.
Before Twitter, I thought Trent Reznor was a deep, intensely disturbed genius. After Twitter, I know that he’s just as average and uncomplicated as I am.
And that sucks. In my experience, the more I know about my heroes, the less they’re my heroes. Turns out we all just want the same thing: an @reply from Mark Hoppus.
Long story short: I don’t like it, but it’s more symptomatic of today’s society than anything as simple as one website. I’m a private cat, and I do realize the irony that I’m saying that in a public blog. And I’ll keep using Twitter kinda cause I gotta. But I just wanted to bitch in a forum without consequence. And THAT is what the internet is all about.
