I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s closer to professing than confessing. It’s not nearly as meaningful as Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. But it will be seen by many as heresy.

I don’t get Twitter!

I think a lot of the frenzied rush to encourage people to sign up for the service and to proclaim it a great way for solo entrepreneurs to get clients is a little – well, frenzied. Much of what appears there seems cacophonous, disjointed, and uninteresting. It’s a mess.

I’m slow to adopt a lot of instant communication technology, so you can use that as a reason to dismiss what I’m saying if you’re one of those Twitter kool-aid drinkers. I’m part of Generation X, but barely, born just after the end of the Baby Boomer epoch.

That guy never used instant messaging?

He hardly ever texts anyone?

He’s really disturbed when people text while driving?

He wonders who in the world all those moms are talking to on cell phones before 8:00 in the morning while they drop off their kids at school?

He’s just figuring out Facebook?

He’s probably a robot. Artificial intelligence that’s clearly artificial and not so intelligent. Does he even know anybody?

On Thursday I put this update on Twitter, which fed it to my Facebook page: “Not sure if I’m a Twitter critter. People say they’re addicted. I can’t even taste it!”

I had been reading Barbara Winter’s Buon Viaggio blog, which is always a treat because Barbara is creative and warm and giving, and an eloquent writer. She had a link to A Beginner’s Quick Start Guide by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. I read it. That was the point when the despair hit me.

I don’t want to twitterpate or twirp or whatever it’s called through my cell phone to the world as I’m getting off a plane, hanging out in a bar, or whatever. That was the value of Twitter he was describing. Tell the world where you are, people will get your twirps on their cell phones, and within moments those nearby will hang out with you.

That’s it? That’s the value of this activity?

I was forlorn, so I decided to creep out of my cave and tell the world I’m just not getting it. I get the irony. I used Twitter to tell Facebook to tell my posse. Barbara Winter graciously encouraged me with a reply – on Twitter. She suggested I read her blog that referenced Tony Hsieh’s article. Oh, the sorrow! What she meant as encouragement, I took as confundation. She’s a Baby Boomer and she gets it. I am lost in the wilderness. Woe is me!

Trying to keep an open mind, I looked for more opportunities to learn about the benefits. I accessed a recording of a free teleseminar where the presenter actually said an advantage of Twitter is that you can follow famous people so you have interactions with them that you normally wouldn’t get to have. No you don’t! You follow famous people, and they completely ignore you, as in real life.

I decided to embrace my dark side and used Google to find other people’s comments about not getting Twitter. I found a few, and they all mention that they get inundated with comments from the Twitter nuts whenever they say something against it. I’m in a tiny minority, but it’s not a minority of one.

I started with Is Twitter TOO Good? in the blog Headrush by Kathy Sierra. It’s a compelling explanation of the way instant mini-messages give an artificial and unsatisfying sense of connection that might really screw up our brains. She has actual scientific data telling me I’m not crazy! That’s more valuable than gold. And more rare.

Fellow luddite Annette Clancy nails the notion that people are infatuated by Twitter as the new-fangled shiny thing in her post Stop Twittering from the blog Interactions. That was utterly validating for me. I had already picked up an “Emperor’s New Clothes” vibe in the Twitter phenomenon and she had the same response.

Why is the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” part of ancient lore? Because it is a universal truth of human nature. We as a species are trapped by wanting to be “in” on the latest thing, to know and speak easily about the latest trend, and to have the newest news. And the trap is reinforced by subtle forms of ridicule and derision that imply those who know about the new thing are superior to those who don’t. Don’t forget, those same ridiculers were the fools who pretended they could see the naked emperor’s clothes to keep others from making fun of them.

Twitter has all the trappings of new-fangled. You get your own lingo. You get tweat, tweaper, twitterpate, twirp, and lots of other words that will now be used to mean the same things as words we already have. You get to learn abbreviations and symbols, which I think makes it a dialect of TXT.

In the movie Contact with Jody Foster, we see the huge array of satellites that are part of the SETI program (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence). Scientists are listening for evidence of alien life, monitoring meaningless static from space for decades hoping to recognize some pattern. Will anything ever make sense? Will they hear anything that might be communication?

That’s me with Twitter. Just a few minutes after getting this movie image in my head, I was reviewing posts that were questioning the value of Twitter (more heretics!) and found one by Alan Patrick in his blog Broadstuff that referred to the “signal to noise ratio” needing to improve to make Twitter useful. It’s titled Got The Twitterbug? In it he references the lengthier critique he wrote called Does Twitter Break Shannon’s Law?

That’s it! Too much noise! Maybe with some code-breaking classes I’ll finally get into the swing of things. But I think it will take me a long time.

It’s confusing enough when I go to a friend’s Facebook site and there is one half of a conversation my friend is having with a person not on my list. Whatever the not-connected-to-me person writes to my friend is on my friend’s wall. Whatever my friend writes back is on the not-connected-to-me person’s wall, which I can’t see. At least some people do things differently. They put their comments below the wall post, so I can follow along. Not that I want to follow along, because it’s not that interesting. But at least I can tell what’s going on so I know for sure it’s unimportant. I don’t have to guess.

On Twitter, I’ll see four or five posts in a row from the same person, but they’re that person’s update and a few comments from that person responding to people I don’t know. They say things like, “@treehuggergoddess Right on! I’ll have to remember that one. Sheri will love it.”

Huh?

Things aren’t threaded like a forum, they’re not sequential like Facebook comments, and they don’t make sense. It’s like sitting in the secret agent’s van parked in a neighborhood trying to spy on one house, but picking up lots of phone conversations and live discussions all at once. I can’t separate out the pieces and put them in a meaningful order. There is no filter.

I jumped up and shouted when I read the following quote about Twitter by Alan Patrick in Broadstuff:

“In all seriousness, I think at some point a usable combined sms/IM/mail service will have a use, but I don’t think this one scales that easily, especially if ones’ friends twitter like canaries about the incredible lightness of their being. (emphasis joyfully added)”

Is anyone writing beautiful words like that on Twitter? I’d love to follow that person.

Sorry, Tony Hsieh, I wouldn’t care that you were eating sushi or just getting off the plane. Go ahead and brush your teeth without me, and be sure you flush after you… you know, but please don’t give me the details.

Enjoy Twitter if you must. Tell me anything useful about it if you can. I’ll twirp there occasionally and try to see if I can begin to get the taste of it. I can only do that while focusing on a few people at a time. I think keeping up with ten might be overwhelming.

Do the people following thousands of other twirpers honestly think we believe they give a rat fart about all those folks?

I’ll keep visiting Twitter, and the rest of you can keep evangelizing. I’ll squint until the bright sunlight through my nearly closed eyes makes it look like maybe, just maybe, that naked emperor actually does have some clothes on. So far, he’s just a fat naked guy with oily skin.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey
Life Work & Self-Employment Advocate (but not yet a Twitter Critter)