Tweeting

Can you transform yourself spontaneously into a member of the bird family? No? Then you can't tweet.

It sounds so crap. "I'm tweeting," "I've just tweeted." Sounds like a euphemism for breaking wind discretely. Or an involuntary tic.

We don't tweet. We compose text messages. Whether on your phone, or in an e-mail, on this blog or on an arbitrary bulletin board such as Twitter, Facebook or the millions of others that are less cool. They're nothing special, they're just different ways of composing text messages. We've been doing it since the '80s.

Twitter is just a mediocre site that does the same as many other sites. Despite this, it's not only transformed into the bulletin board of choice, but the marketers managed to invent a word specific to their site that has entered common language. Even the media use it. "If you want to know more, follow our tweets." No thanks, and if you want to know my opinion, you sound as if you need to see a doctor about that irritable bowel syndrome. They're just Doctor Evils, saying "look, we're hip, we're with it." It's all just a load of crap designed to sell an idea, and they've fallen for a cheap fad for the sake of publicity.

"Tweeting" is a way of making something mundane sound new and better than the rest, just like marketing does with all other products and services. But it isn't new, and it isn't better. Forget about the preconceptions you've been fed, and just think about what it is. It even has a severe restriction on the number of characters you can type in per message, which in fact makes it worse than some of the others. "Don’t let the small size fool you", Twitter's about page tells you. "You can share a lot with a little space." Well yes, you can, but you can share even more with a better bulletin board with fewer restrictions. And even the word "tweet" means to write a text message on Twitter. Not any of the other sites, just Twitter. If it's not Twitter, you're not tweeting. Don't you see what they're doing? Don't you see?

In short (but using more than 140 characters - just because I can, as I'm not using Twitter), it's nothing more than a tragic marketing trumph. Every sucker has been pulled in, lured by the prestige of "tweeting" and the cool, shallow connotations that it provides.

The idiot public is suckered into it just so that can say they've "tweeted", which is somehow a good thing, and the media is suckered into latching on to something trendy for their own pretentious reasons. You know all those pathetic adverts that you've watched on TV and thought, "who on Earth is gullible and moronic enough to be taken in by that shite and buy the product?" Well, if you use Twitter, that person is the likes of you.

Let me market a slogan of my own: "Don't be a twat, stop using Twitter."