I Get By With A Little Tweet From My Friends

I’ve written on this topic before, but have addressed only the very basic concerns most people have when they first hear about Twitter. Now, almost a year later, Twitter is as culturally pervasive as Facebook, with millions of regular users worldwide. Contrary to my original theory, however, Twitter awareness isn’t always a good thing. The reason I’m repeatedly drawn to this topic is because I identify myself proudly with the Twitter community. I am also incorrigibly bellicose about matters relating to technology. And while I’m definitely a proponent of critiquing popular trends and fads, I believe people’s negative opinions about Twitter are ultimately misguided.

I’m a man of simplicity. I like it when things work quickly and quietly. No amount of features makes a sluggish, monster of a product worth using when there are simpler, more effective alternatives available. This is why I’m such a huge fan of Facebook Lite—despite its lack of support for Notes, Groups, and a few other things on the full featured Facebook, the layout is clean, zippy, and (yeah, I know everyone says it) Twitter-like.

Why do I like Twitter? Because it’s the epitome of simple social networking. Twitter is a simple feed. That’s it. If I find someone interesting, I follow them. If I find someone’s tweets annoying irrelevant to me, I don’t follow them. And that’s all the social management I have to worry about.

Many of my friends seem to have developed this idea that Twitter is something akin to texting maniacs and media sponges whose vain conceit drives their every syllable. While this is true for some users, Twitter is only what you make it. If you’re interested in celebrities and uploading hourly pictures and having millions of followers and following millions of people, more power to you! If you’re like me and simply don’t find the occasion to update for a few days and forgo keeping up with your feed for a while, that’s cool too! Chances are you’ll develop usage habits that suit your needs uniquely.

Here’s the bottom line: in my view, Twitter reduces social networking to all that it ever needs to be in a way that is more effective than networks with all the bells and whistles. Twitter allows you to create conversations, memes, and a distinct culture, all using a brilliantly simple system of 140-character updates.

A lot of your friends are already on Twitter! Including me! Log on and use your old pal Google to figure out the rest.

First Post

In my life I have always found solace through the medium of writing. When I was ten I began my first journal, chronicling everything from the momentous to the mundane (mostly mundane) for the first few years. I was also a ravenous reader as a child, blazing through books and series’ of books without much effort. As my childhood progressed, words began to inhabit every corner of it. I wasn’t out with my friends, eating pizza at Chuck-E-Cheese and watching Jurassic Park (in fact, it wasn’t until this past June that I watched the first one). I was at home, writing in my journal, or reading. Occasionally I played N64 and Pokémon cards when I went over to friends’ houses.

In high school I began blogging. My first ever post, believe it or not, was about a college football game (University of Tennessee vs. University of Florida) in which I ranted that the referees had ruined the game for Florida with some heinous calls, and the touchdowns compromised by those calls were to blame for Florida’s loss. This was to herald a trend in my writing: rants about issues I felt were unjust or needed my personal enlightenment. This first post contains the only mention of sports out of any of my subsequent posts to this day.

My high school experiences had a tremendous impact on my writing. I made my closest friends in high school, and through these new relationships experienced a tumultuous time in my growth as a human being. I began to absorb more ideas from outside of the influence of my home, encountering new methods and perspectives. I found plenty that I didn’t like. These became the subjects of my posts, which dealt mostly with theological issues, because my school had a very mainstream evangelical understanding of Christianity that in many ways conflicted with the reformed, missional tradition I had been raised in.

After high school, I left my home, and the cycle has so far repeated itself. I was and have been in a state of absorption. It’s been exciting in many ways and tough in more than a few, but it’s a time in my life that I have been markedly silent. Except through social mediums like Facebook and Twitter, I haven’t really shared much about what I’m thinking or even doing all the time. To be honest, it’s mostly mundane—this quarter in particular has been a jumbled mess of work, school, Young Life, and the joys (and challenges) of living in a house with four room mates.

All this time my major has remained Undeclared, and I haven’t made too much progress in my thoughts about career since I graduated high school. I had a stronger inclination to teach then, but it was at a time when I felt I had much to teach. Since last year I have realized to a fuller extent how limited my knowledge has always been, and how small of a person I am in this immense, beautiful, painful, puzzling world we live in. I couldn’t find anything to write about because I lost all confidence in my ability to fully comprehend any subject I tried to pursue. Every post ran into a dead end. What was the point, and who was I convincing?

I recently came to the conclusion that this shouldn’t stop me from writing, because I’m considering it as a major factor in my search for a field of study. I owe much of my inspiration to my friend Chris Knight, who is a regular contributor to Geeky Pleasures and has just recently “relaunched” a blog of his own. So I’m committing myself to write again on this fresh palette, to boldly share my thoughts on subjects which I am entirely unqualified to address. The design is bare and minimalistic now, because eventually I will learn CSS well enough to tweak the appearance and host my own page, and I want my design, like my writing, to be honest.

I hope you’ll bear with me as I continue my long-abandoned quest to grow closer to my Creator through the wonky lenses he has given me.