Twittering Our Lives Away

I have been blogging for about eleven months now. Admittedly, one of the major reasons I do so is as an attempt to promote myself and my writing, not to mention that if a guy wants to write he has to write. By forcing myself into the position of having to produce daily, or at least as close to daily as I can, I am also ideally refining the quality of what I write. I will be able to, hopefully anyway, write better technically as well as for the entertainment of a general readership.

Now I am told that I should Twitter. I ought to get a Twitter account and update that constantly in postings of less than 140 characters. That will, the good Lord willing and the creek don't rise, generate interest in me. If I can gain a following of people wanting to hear about the minute and mundane details of my daily life I might get a decent enough following to promote my books and websites.

That's as may be. Yet I cannot understand how or why people should be interested in the smallest events in my life, even though there is ample evidence that that, for many out there in our world, just might be the case. All I can see is that I would not care about me having just dealt with a dumb customer or unwilling student, depending on whether I was at my sales or teaching job at the moment. And I certainly would not want to lament a disagreement with anyone in my family to the world at large; there is still such as thing as decorum and courtesy, isn't there? Besides, do folks really care about that? And if so, why?

Have our lives become so dreary that we must live vicariously through even the most trite details of someone else's life? Someone we may not even know except through droll and banal little descriptions of unimportant details? Do I want people with that sort of outlook interested in me?

Quite frankly, the whole enterprise strikes me as downright creepy. The kindest thing I can think to say is that the whole idea is shallow: what kind of a nation are we when we think it somehow cool to Twitter that the chicken salad we just ate was too spicy or bland? How cool can that possibly be to read?

Sure, perhaps it's just fun. There's nothing wrong with it on that level I suppose. I simply may be behind the curve. Any way you see it, for now, I shall not Twitter. I hope I never do. I'm not sure that I want success so badly that I would become so arrogant as to think it worth belittling my life in that manner. I should like to believe that I, that ever twitterer out there, am/is worth more than that.