A love/hate relationship with
Twitter
How one of the most
useful things on the internet never ceases to annoy me.[Picture of Twitter logo]
The source of my headache.
If thirty years ago you’d
asked someone what the world would be like if anyone, anywhere could
communicate with someone on the other side of the globe instantly, effortlessly
and for free, you may have received a few reactions. Some may have said that it
would help bring the world closer together, that with greater communication
would bring greater understanding, leading to peace between contrasting groups
around the planet. Or if you’re a cynic such as myself and you don’t believe
any of that hippy nonsense, then you may have said something along the lines of
‘Great! More people to annoy me with stuff I don’t care about’. As of 2014,
social networking site Twitter has upwards of 250 million people using their
site to share the most mundane and uninteresting going-ons in their lives.
As much as I bash Twitter I
still find myself oddly drawn to it as a service, as it is more the people that
use it that give me headaches rather than the actual site itself. I find that
if you can narrow down the people you see to those who share common interest as
you it can actually be rather useful and interesting. Imagine the potential
from having a group of minds focused around a single subject all contributing
ideas and opinions from all over the globe.
But no. We use this great
advancement in communication in technology for stupid reasons like taking
pictures of food or to moan about some of the pointless stuff we can. I’m all
for having a moan as [SPOILER ALERT] that’s what 90% of this article is about,
but complaining to a bunch of people sat in front their computer screens wont
make the bus come quicker or make you that sandwich because your hungry.
The worst part is the hive
mind Twitter users seem to have. When a hash tag comes up that requires people
to even attempt to be witty, the
average is five jokes. Five. Five
jokes that are constantly repeated between twenty thousand or so people trying
to scrounge retweets from others in an attempt to validate their poor attempt
at comedy. After seeing the same awful joke for the twentieth time inside an
hour, the urge festers inside you to put your fist through something. It’s like
the people mindlessly copying and pasting it straight into my timeline never had
the thought cross their mind that people may possibly have seen the joke
before. It would be like if the Edinburgh Fringe had every comedian repeating
the five jokes from the back of Penguin bars, its terrible.
On top of this is the
Twitter hate hive mind that befalls people who excessively tweet stuff that
(ironically) annoy the masses, honorable mentions going to TV presenter Piers
Morgan and footballer Joey Barton, to the point that the people blindly sending
hateful comments towards those half the time have no idea what they themselves
are going on about. Even worse is the racial hate some get like ex-footballer
Stan Collymore, the amount of racial abuse and abuse in general this guy gets
is sickening. Admittedly he’s not a saint, far from it, but does the guy
deserve to be living with hate more akin to the 60's and 70's than 2014? No. And chances are half the people abusing
the guy over Twitter would never even dream of saying such stuff to the guy in
person.
Although this being said,
being a football fan, Twitter allows for some great … ‘debates’, if you can
call 19 year old's swearing and generally taking a shot at one another about
anything other than the teams they support
‘debating’. I can. From a neutral point of view, it’s almost as entertaining as
the football itself, some times more so.
I suppose the upside of
Twitter is that any annoying crap that some one wants to say they have to be
inside 140 characters, which makes it kind of bearable but not by much. Tweeting about your mad
Saturday night and wanting McDonalds to deliver will still make me hate you,
just hate you in a small amounts of words.
The worst part is even
though I've spent the last god knows how long explaining everything that I hate
about Twitter, I can’t stop using it.
As much as I complain about it, whenever I have a spare moment, like waiting
for a bus or what ever, I whip out my phone and browse Twitter. I wish it was a
simple as ‘stop using it’ as many have often said I should do when I bring up
how much I hate it. It’s like a subconscious addiction to see what people deem
important enough to tell me about.
In all though, I can see why
Twitter has had such a wide appeal to people, even it does just boil down to
everyone just spouting out what nonsense pops into their heads. Maybe I am
being cynical for the sake of being cynical, if close to a quarter of a billion
people worldwide use Twitter, it has to be doing something right. Maybe it’s
everyone else that’s wrong.
I’m inclined to go with the
latter.
No comments:
Post a Comment