I'm writing this post to test out something called Twitterfeed. For those of you that don't know what Twitter is, it's basically a website where you type in your status and other people you know (or don't know) follow what you're doing. That's exactly right: instead of picking up the phone and asking you how you're doing or what's going on, they look at your Twitter, read that you're currently sitting at work, picking your nose and they're satisfied with that knowledge.
Adding a layer to that, there are all kinds of applications that you can feed into your Twitter, so that instead of typing that you're at work, picking your nose on your Facebook, Twitter and blog, you only do it once and Twitterfeed farms it out to the rest of them.
Anyway, I find this obsession with status really interesting. I don't know how many people read this blog on a given day (I suppose I could find out for certain if I really wanted to), but I'm sure it's less than 10. And the only reason that people see my status on Facebook is because a couple hundred people are my "friends" and Facebook forces them to see what I'm doing.
It's all just so personally impersonal. Does it give the trivialities of my day some kind of meaning, knowing that 13 people are giving them a casual glance? To me, no, it doesn't. The same with this blog, which I write more for personal enjoyment than anything else. But I fear that it does to some other people. This InterWeb thing is really fickle. It's a "here today, gone tomorrow" kind of medium. Ask ObamaGirl. I just get the sense that people really care whether people are watching. And I guess it speaks to how highly we value celebrity in this country, no matter what that celebrity is.
Information transfer is a powerful tool, but not for things like whether I'm at the diner, eating a piece of pie. That just flat out doesn't matter. It barely matters to me and I'm the one doing it. It didn't matter last year when someone texted me, five years ago when they called me on my cell phone, ten years ago when they paged me or twenty years ago when they called me at home and got my answering machine.
Either way, hopefully this Twitterfeed thing works. I don't care about who's looking. I'm just lazy and don't want to have to write this 12 times.
Labels: Twitterfeed
