To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

So I’ve been talking to an artist who’s involved in a lot of on-line marketing and promotion of her work, very successfully, and she’s telling me how important Twitter is. I know she’s right, so I paid attention. While I signed up on Twitter a month or two ago, I haven’t done anything with it.
Publishers expect you to be involved in things that will market your book. Blogs, MySpace, Facebook—that’s how I got involved in all of these. This blog started out as a way to get out the word about the last book. It has turned into so much more, of course—I discovered that I love it A Lot. I have not had a similar love affair with MySpace or Facebook, however. I like Facebook well enough, but I don’t get most of what goes on there. Oh, I “get” it, as in understand how it works. Pretty much. But I don’t get the obsession with it, the constant postings about what people are eating or the games and challenges and quizzes—and I’ve gotta ask here:  who in the hell writes those things? Those quizzes are the most insipid, grammatically challenged time wasters I’ve ever seen. I don’t know about everyone else, but if I find something anywhere that is filled with errors and illogic and just complete vapid “what the hell?” silliness, my brain just sort of rolls up in a ball and whimpers.
Oh, let’s be honest:  if I find something filled with errors—never mind anything else—something that’s been disseminated to the public—I just assume it’s a waste of time. If the person who created it and put it out there For Public Consumption couldn’t bother to get it right, why should I bother to deal with it?
But I can find some redeeming bits in Facebook, at least:  I like it when people put up new photos, and I like knowing when someone’s seeing the review copy of their new book and is all excited about that, or when someone’s going to have a show somewhere. I like finding new artists and hearing about good books. Stuff like that. And I like checking up on people I know—I’ve gotta tell you, it’s great to be able to check up and find out if one of your editors has vanished from the face of the earth or if he’s just on vacation. Good to know; hard to find out pre-Facebook. So, see, it has some things I like. I can hang with it.
But Twitter? Since my conversation on Monday, I’ve set out to Figure Out Twitter. I went in and dicked around with my home page so I didn’t hate it so much—not like I had a lot of options, but I did Photoshop one of The EGE’s photos, removing telephone lines, and set it for the background. And then I went to the bookstore and spent an hour picking out $60 worth of How To Do Twitter books. Because when I decide to do something, I need books.
I’ve been reading them, dicking around some more. I now understand the concepts of hashtags and re-tweeting and @myname and following, and I’ve installed TweetDeck and Ping.fm and I’ve linked the latter to Twitter and Facebook and MySpace. So it’s not like I’m clueless. I get it.
But I don’t Get It. I’m reading the tweets (oh, and isn’t the whole bird metaphor just too twee for words?) and trying to think of things to tweet and trying to think of something to say about the things others are tweeting, and I just sit here baffled, scratching my head (literally—this is making my scalp itch = probably bird mites) and going, “What in the hell are these people doing?” I don’t get it. Why in the world does someone in Rhode Island care about what someone they’ve never, ever met in life—someone in France--thinks about the memorial service for Michael Jackson, someone else they’ve never met in life? Why do they care what someone in Kansas thinks about the Sotomayor confirmation hearings? Is it just me? Am I so misanthropic that I somehow fail to understand humans’ deep need to feel a part of a larger tribe and share their every thought?
And let me tell you here:  I do not get the whole Tribal Thang at all. I read things about “my tribe” and “my peeps” and just don’t get it. Sure, I think of y’all as people with whom I have something in common (a great sense of humor and fondness for the word “fuck,” for example), but I don’t think of us as a tribe. I think of a “tribe” as a group of people given to xenophobia and insularity who expect all members to adhere to certain ways of thinking and doing and being.
That just scares the crap out of me.
Now, I could go on here and list all the possible reasons I feel this way—family history, childhood, blah, blah, blah—but that would be just self-indulgent. What I’m interested in here is cultural:  why is it that people feel the need to be in constant contact with other people and to know what those people are doing and thinking about everything from whatever TV show is the Must-See TV for this week to the life of today’s hottest celebrity/politician/current public fuck-up?
In the evenings when we turn on the tv to watch a Netflix movie, the tv is set to the weather channel, and we often catch a couple minutes of that while we’re sitting down to dinner. I’ve noticed that now they solicit e-mails and tweets about people’s opinions about the weather.
What the fuck? I thought the weather channel was designed to give people accurate, up-to-date information about the weather (duh) and, because it’s on 24 hours a day and has to have some other content to keep people coming back, to provide informative bits—shows, interviews, whatever—about weather-related topics. But to solicit opinions from viewers? I don’t know about y’all, but let me tell you this:  I don’t know shit about meteorology. I can recognize a mammatous cloud, sure (although I would be hard pressed to find Michael Jackson’s face lurking in it, seeing as how I can’t imagine which particular one of his many faces might be cloud-worthy), but do you really want to know what I think about any weather-related phenomena? I think not. If you turn to the weather channel, chances are you want to find out about the weather, not what some woman in Midland, Texas, thinks about climate change or the rain in Kentucky or whether or not it’s going to snow in NYC in October. I mean, really:  talk about a waste of time.
Why is it that we have come to believe that everything we think and do is of interest to people who have never met us? Why do we think our opinions matter on subjects about which we have very, very little factual information? (Because, of course, we spend all our leisure reading time NOT in reading fact-based, thoroughly-researched essays and articles but public-edited on-line articles and re-tweets from people who have not yet grasped the concept of “unsubstantiated rumor.”)
It’s driving me nuts. On the one hand, I must embrace social media. It’s part of my job. I understand its value in bringing people together, getting the word out. Hell, what prompted me finally to join (something I’d been putting off, even though I knew I needed to do it for The Book) was because Susan Shie, whom I adore, posted a note on Facebook saying she joined in response to the crisis in Iran.
I understand the value of that. And I understand that things like that—people’s response in a crisis—can’t happen unless the groundwork’s been laid, unless people have joined in and linked up and are in contact with each other.
But goodlordalmighty. The more I read, the more baffled I become. And the more I rant on our daily walks. And the sadder and more discouraged I become. Once upon a time, The West was a land of quirky, independent people who were interested in doing things their own way. We looked at Japanese society, with its emphasis on homogeneity, as a very sad place. We prided ourselves on our rampant individuality and independence.
And now? Oh, I understand that things have changed. For one thing, the population just keeps expanding, crowding us more and more closely together. In order to get people to live in such proximity without constantly being at each other’s throats , it’s necessary that we instill a sense of tribal groupthink in them. We’re all a part of this larger group, and so it behooves us to get along.
Same thing with the whole 9-11 Homeland Security Patriot Act Fear Mongering Aren’t You Scared to Death thing:  you’ve got to get people to band together, to give greater value to the common good, the survival of the hive, than they do to their own individual freedom and independence.
I get all that. But I don’t Get It. You know? I don’t get why people don’t think about this, don’t see where it’s going and what it’s doing to individual thought and ideas and opinions. If you’re constantly checking what other people are doing/saying/thinking, you have no time to do anything of your own. To think. To read. To make something. You don’t know what you believe because your head is constantly being filled with what other people believe. You don’t have time to form your own opinions about anything because, as soon as you hear about it, you also hear what everyone else thinks about it.
And with Twitter, you don’t know what’s true and what’s rumor, what’s really happening and what someone thinks is happening and what might have never even come close to happening.
Think about how much misinformation is out there. Not just among Regular People, but even among People Who Are Supposed to Know Shit. For instance:  I once read a front-page news story about an accident, or a trial about an accident, in which An Expert was explaining that time of death was determined, in part, by dependent lividity. The reporter went on to explain, quite helpfully, that this meant they could determine when the patient had died by the fervor of the attendant family members.
Huh?
Well, if you have no clue what “dependent lividity” means, since, of course, you never read anything but USA Today and endless Tweets, and you go and look the words up in the dictionary, you might come away thinking “lividity” here means “anger,” and dependent” means “a relative.”
That was roughly when I gave up on the newspaper for anything except obituaries (you know:  you get to a certain age and find the obits full of people you know) and the garage sales. Everything else requires too damn much checking. It’s exhausting.
Where was I? [goes to check]
Ahh. Why people care about what strangers are doing and thinking. I’m formulating an idea here, and this is it so far:  I think that, because we’re slowly losing all sense of our unique selves, our individuality, we need to have our every thought and impulse validated by others. Nothing we do means anything unless others are doing it, too. Or unless our doing it somehow provokes envy and admiration in others. We want to be a part of things, or we want to have others admire us = still being a part of things, but being The Best of That Part.
Oh, sure = there are people who are unlike anyone else, people who treasure their individuality and ability to go their own way without validation. But, oh, the rarity! And here’s something to think about:  think of the people you know who are like this. How old are they? Can you think of many in their teens? Twenties? How about 50’s? 70’s? I’m not talking about misfits, either, people who might well like to be part of a tribe if there were a whole Completely Fucked Unto the Lord Tribe that would have them. No:  I mean people who are completely themselves and do what they do and think what they think and have no desire to go along with what everyone else is doing and thinking.
Often you will find them in that little group called “artists.” Oh, sure—you’ll find a lot of Famous Artists on Facebook and using Twitter. But you’re also going to discover that a lot of Famous Artists aren’t there at all. They’re not there, and while their name may turn up in a Google search, you won’t find their blog or, often, even a website. They don’t have An On-Line Presence. What they do have is a Working Their Butt Off in the Studio Presence, one where they’re blissfully unaware of whether or not it’s “possible to watch the sotoshow” on their iPhone or that the end credits of the new Harry Potter movie are soundtracked by the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” Because what’s filling their brains is not the schlock the rest of us take for granted, the buzz and blips and gossip and speculation that swirls around all of us and, even as I write this, is blipping onto TweetDeck. What’s filling their brains is ideas, experiences re-interpreted, inspiration, what-if’s, memories transformed, mysteries imagined. They don’t have time for endless chatter about HP6 or the inclination to respond to tweets like “#GoRoadDogs Go Road Dogs #GoRoadDogs Go Road Dogs #GoRoadDogs Go Road Dogs #GoRoadDogs”
It’s not only artists, of course. There are a lot of other people out there who are Not Connected by choice. Not because they’re too old to understand The World Wide Web or because they’re too poor to own an iPhone or too whatever. It’s because they are working and thinking, and they don’t have time for endless chatter and tweets and status updates. What they have, instead, is time for Ideas. And for determining value:  they have time to experience their days and relationships and thoughts and determine what is of value to them and what is not. That value is not determined for them by the opinion of the masses, but by their own lives and their own individual experiences.
Connection is good. It’s good to know what’s going on in the lives of people we know, people we care about. It’s good to know about things that can effect our lives in important ways. And it’s great to be able to have access to opportunities we’d never otherwise have:  Etsy has been a huge boon to artists all over the world. My friend I talked to Monday has learned to make an on-line presence work for her in ways that benefit not only her but all the people who love what she does and would otherwise never be able to see her work or take a workshop or listen to an interview.
But, on the other hand, there’s a creeping dependence on constant connectedness that really worries me. I’d like to think it’s a pendulum and will swing back the other way, to a heightened sense of individual adventure and experience and experimentation. But I fear that’s not the case here.
Let’s hope I’m proven wrong.