Taking a Break From Twitter

When I first came to Twitter, I thought the whole concept was pretty stupid. Too simple to be entertaining. It was advertised as a micro-blogging site, and blogging is a bandwagon I haven't been motivated to jump on as you can tell from the present Tabulas page which I never remember to update. Telling my life in short sentences or in long paragraphs is just something I'm not interested in.

I kept coming to Twitter for a few days, posting immensely pointless messages, then starting to forget about it; one more name in the endless list of websites I've signed up to just for trying out.

I don't remember why suddenly everything changed, why I returned to Twitter and became so active, perhaps because I kept seeing the name and logo everywhere, even mentioned in serious newspapers, to the point having a well-kept Twitter account seemed as indispensable as having an email address. Or perhaps because I ended up using the search feature and adding people to follow, which is the key to get things started.

Whatever the reasons, in the past year I've been writing 4700 tweets, most of them replies, and reading practically everything that the 89 persons I follow wrote. In practice, a lot of them simply don't tweet and I'm grateful they don't; because even reading between 15~20 persons' tweets daily take more time than I'd like to admit. The other 70 simply forgot Twitter better than I did.

Twitter started to become a problem when I realized I kept checking new tweets in real time, as they were posted. I always had a browser tab set on Twitter to check incoming messages. And this the asset I hadn't figured when I came to this site, the real potential of Twitter isn't so much about blogging, it's the concatenation of at least three key social aspects of the Internet: blog, chatrooms and instant messaging. You're invited to talk openly like in a blog, you meet strangers like in a chatroom, you have conversations at all times like in IM.

Some people are addicted to online games, some others may be to social networks, for my part I was hooked on chatrooms. That's one of the first things I did on the Internet and I spent an awful lot of time on it in the first years. Eventually I wised up and quit, but I know how easy it is to get dragged into conversations that last for hours. And now I realize that, imperceptibly, this is what I've done with Twitter, I've turned it into a subtle yet highly efficient chatroom. Day in, day out. The reason why I've decided to take a break from it is to get my time back and not fall into this same old trap.

Coincidentally, I just read today a medical article (well, the beginning at least) from the New York Times on the effects of computers, websites and other virtual gadgets on our brain. I don't think I am as badly addicted as the family man who's interviewed but I did find some worrying similitudes. For instance, the effects that it may have on long term concentration as we spend more and more time fluttering from one application to another, from one website to another, from one tweet to the next.