Column:

Bitter about Twitter

By Sami Hall

Published Oct. 20, 2009

If I hear one more person talk about Twitter I might have to smack someone.

Of all the inane things in our world, Twitter takes the cake. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Twitter is one of the more recent popular social networking tools on the Internet.

It allows a person to tell "followers" — code for "creepy stalkers" — what they are doing at that exact moment in time. Never mind how commonplace, boring or stupid the action is, everything is fair game for Twitter. Updates to one's Twitter account are limited to 140 characters, reinforcing the inexplicable trend of replacing words with letters and vice versa.

The worst part? When someone updates his or her Twitter, it is called a "tweet." Tweety Bird is rolling in his grave.

The entire concept of Twitter rests on one mistaken assumption: Other people really care about what you are doing every second of the day.

Celebrities seem to be the ones most stricken with this new wave of narcissism. If celebrities aren't proving to the world they are uneducated, they are making sure we know just how self-involved they are. An update about how you just woke up feeling great is not interesting to anyone but you and maybe your mother. Sorry.

But the worst offenders are the news networks. Lately, when I watch CNN or any comparable, reliable TV news network, I not only get the story, but what Stan in Ohio thinks of the story. Pardon me, Stan, but I really could not care less about your opinion of the balloon boy. I need real news. Events, facts, interviews. I need to know what happened, why it happened, what might happen and what will happen.

Twitter seems to have reprioritized the world. Now, instead of worrying about world events such as the earthquakes in Sumatra, we are more concerned with the update Miley Cyrus, who is the epitome of self-involved, just posted about her new outfit. Suddenly, non-news has become news, and the stories holding true meaning to the lives of real people are ignored and disregarded. And even when we do cover real news, we still get the garbled mess that is a Twitter update.

I really could not care less about what Paula Abdul, Ashton Kutcher or, worst of all, Spencer Pratt is doing. Their lives are highly inconsequential, especially in relation to my life and the lives of my loved ones.

When will people's love affair with Twitter end? We need to realize although our personal lives are interesting to us, they are called personal lives for a reason: They are personal and therefore private. If you really want to tell others about an event in your life, go the old-fashioned route and yell from a mountaintop. You might even get CNN to tell you what John in Seattle thought you could have done better.