Web is a-Twitter with self-indulgence

I do not Twitter. I make no apologies for this.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is an online "community," which is geek speak for a collection of people with nothing better to do.

Twitter, however, takes the concept of the vacuous community to a new level of inanity. While people may waste great amounts of time writing about themselves on MySpace or posting mindless videos of themselves on YouTube, Twitter aims a little lower. It strives for narcissism in real time by posing the question "what are you doing right now?"

You're supposed to answer, ad nauseam, by e-mail or by text message from a phone or a PDA.

People actually do this. I was alerted to this fact by the Chronicle's computer columnist, Dwight Silverman, who recently said he would Twitter one of my columns.

He said he's gotten several news tips from Twitter "conversations."

To make Twitter work, you have to invite others to join you. It may be one of the more obnoxious abuses of friendship since MCI introduced the Friends and Family Plan, otherwise known as "we leave the marketing to you."

Why is this necessary? Why can't we talk to friends on the phone or through e-mail or, shudder the thought, actually sit down and have a face-to-face conversation?

I must admit to, on occasion, scanning YouTube. I'm fascinated by the multitude of people, consumed by their own sense of self, who litter the Internet with low-quality videos. Some are funny.

Most are not.

Yet millions of people post and watch daily.

On MySpace, people create pages about themselves and send messages to each other, many of which implore them to look at each other's pages.

This online monument to reflexive self-indulgence was bought in late 2005 by Rupert Murdoch for $580 million. Google, meanwhile, paid nearly $1.7 billion for YouTube last year.


Web 2.0
Twitter, YouTube and MySpace are part of what technophiles call "Web 2.0," the next generation of Internet sites — "communities," "folksonomies," "wikis" and other collections of social networking that purport to find purpose in simply linking everyone together.

The great promise of the Internet, apparently, is that I can find out what thousands of strangers are thinking of eating for lunch.

OK, I don't get it, and I understand that I don't get it.

But here's what I do get: While the youth of America are a-Twitter with the need to tell the world what they're doing every moment — "still watching CNN" says one of the posts on Dwight's page; "mmmm bacon cheeseburgers" says another — the Chinese are teaching kids math and science.

While we contemplate our virtual navels, the world is passing us by.

Somewhere, amid all this connectivity, some people still do things. And that doing, that accomplishment, matters more than simply talking about nothing. Me watching you doing nothing still equals nothing.


Blogging with purpose
Of course, critics could argue that even blogs, such as mine, serve little purpose. Discussions on blogs, though, ought to be about something. Interactivity is great as long as it isn't just for the sake of interactivity.

I love new electronic gadgets, but I've also grown tired of the false urgency that envelops everything online. Most e-mails can wait. Many can be ignored.

I've been BlackBerry-free for three years. The sun still rises.

I don't have to read every news snippet collected hourly by my RSS reader, which culls dozens of Web sites and blogs for news stories. I just don't have time.

Some things require an urgent response, of course. If your hair is on fire, for example.

But most of what we do isn't worthy of being broadcast as it happens, nor is it worthy of being read or viewed by others.


Who really cares?
As I write this, I pull on my beard. My fingers idly find an eyebrow hair that seems inappropriately long. I think they may be getting thicker as I get older. Is that possible? Is it a sign of illness?

Do you care? Does the world care? I rest my case.

If this is the future of the Web, then the days of the Pets.com sock puppet were truly a golden age.

The French philosopher René Descartes once posited that the essence of humanity is the ability to think. What then, would Descartes make of so many spending so much time pondering so little?

I think, therefore I Twitter not.