Surprising to some - it may be said - but the Professor is not always an early adopter of technology. He is however a very keen gadget hound and usually tries everything at least once. He opines (in the third person) that its a bit like sushi... how do you know if you are going to die unless you try it...
OK so back to the first person and I think I have said before that I find Twitter a little obtrusive. Now I am beginning to find it annoying in certain cases. I do find there are some very good times when Twitter Tweets are very useful. I have noted before that they are great during conferences and probably during emergency situations. But for the rest - well I just have a hard time justifying my very precious time with perhaps a lot of junk.
So my problem is that I don't have the ability to edit it or to know if the person is sending valuable information in the tweets or just describing the contents of their lunch. So it would seem that we are now beginning to suffer a worldwide viral explosion of the new disease Twitarrhea.
This new and it would seem quite pervasive disease is characterized by very often quite rational and sane people using their cellphones to engage in mindless activities and opinions of seldom any relevance. And just because it can be done in 140 characters should not be an excuse to send a stream of the effluent.
It this wasn't bad enough it seems that there is a secondary disease that affects an even greater percentage of the population called Spanish Tweettimetheftuenza. (With full apologies to the people of the Iberian peninsula). This secondary disease could be more harmful to the world than Twitarrhea in that it has now stolen many billions of minutes of people's time causing reduced productivity in the workplace and relationship strain and breakup.
For some extreme examples of Twitarrhea - I refer you to the famous Robert X Cringely.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2009/03/escape_from_the.html?source=NLC-NOTES&cgd=2009-03-16
I often admonish my readers to be careful and be warned to terrible afflictions. This is perhaps the most important warning I have given to date.
DON'T DO IT. If I may quote one of the most famous statements of all time (and butcher it just a little) from Walt Disney's Bambi:
"If you cannot Tweet something nice then don't tweet anything at all"
Here here.. I thought I was the only one who thought the world had gone mad! It was starting to draw a real parallel with the fable of the emperors new clothes!
ReplyDeleteWho wants to know what everyone is up to 24/7. Strikes me that twitter is legitimized spam! Lets put the bird back in the nest and we can all get back onto something more important !