I deleted my @RRRJessica twitter account recently.
The reason is simple and the fault is all mine: I can’t handle the Twitter. I didn’t tweet all that much, but I would check in quite often to see what others were tweeting. Sure, I could use Leechblock or set rules to keep my tweet lurking down, but I don’t need yet one more thing in my life that I have to exercise self-control over. And I found that Twitter encouraged me to split my attention in an unhealthy manner. I knew I was in trouble the other day when I seriously contemplated buying a Banana Bunker at the MoMA museum store just so I could showcase it on Twitpic (I still kind of regret not buying it, actually). I just want to be where I am when I am there.
So that was the reason, but now I get to the rationalizations, i.e. the ex post facto arguments I use to make myself feel better about de-tweeting. If you don’t want to see Twitter criticized, stop reading now!:
1. I’ve heard all about how you are supposed to use your blog as the mother ship and Twitter and other social media as smaller vessels. While I could sometimes see positive stat effects of the heavyweight retweet, the fact is that this is a niche blog which will never appeal to a very large audience. What makes this blog strong is good posts, and the more time I spent tweeting, the less energy I had for blog posts. Writing blog posts is draining, but at least you have achieved something when you finish. With Twitter, the energy just kind of gets sucked into the Twitterverse with no return on investment. As Blogher Super Jive memorably put it, “If a good, well-thought out blog post is a night making sweet, sweet love to Al Green, then Twittering was thirty seconds in the art supply closet huffing glue. Quick, dirty, and when you tumble out of there you can’t remember jack and you have a sharp headache.”
I’m not witty or pithy, so my unremarkable Twitter stream is not the legacy I want my online presence to leave, yet, unlike Facebook, it’s open, forever, to anyone. It’s like having a permanent public record of every off the cuff remark you’ve ever made. If that doesn’t make you shudder, you are a much better person than I am. The anonymity problem hit me when someone I admire in my academic field started following me. I emailed him to suggest he try following my professional Twitter account instead (which boasts exactly one tweet a month, but at least I don’t talk about Banana Bunkers on it). He demurred. Blocking him would be an insult, but I found myself thinking with two hats while tweeting. I also found myself tempted to tweet things about work or people in my life that are unwise to share. Some of you may remember my wrath on the day promotional material went out about a “public health” event with a crucial letter in the first word — l — missing. In real life, I would never gripe about a coworker to anyone but my husband — it’s just not how I handle things — but I did that day. Twitter poses a certain temptation that I would just as soon do without.
2. I also felt that Twitter was impacting my attempt to be as noncommercial as possible on this blog. I’ve blogged about why I don’t accept free copies of books for review, or participate in author promos. At first, on Twitter, I didn’t follow any authors for the same reason. But when May rolled around and the @replies rules changed, I had to follow authors and editors in order to make any sense of what the bloggers I followed were saying. I found it affected what I wanted to write on the blog.
3. It took a lot of concentration and effort to try to engage in any type of real conversation within Twitter’s constraints. They say Twitter is a like a cocktail party. How likely is it that you will have a meaningful conversation over the noise and interruptions of a cocktail party? I tried a few of the #followreader chats but they were a nightmare. Even one-on-one chats were exercises in futility. I would often ask a follow up question only to find out my interlocutor answered it already in a tweet I hadn’t seen yet. If my interlocutor had more to say than one tweet could accommodate, I would sit and wait for the second, the third, the fourth tweet … not exactly an expedient way to chat.
4. Twitter bots. I wanted my follow count to reflect real people. I felt like I was spending too much time blocking spammers. Twitter has really got to do a better job with this.
5. Being overwhelmed. The romance genre is terrifyingly large. How many hundreds of books are published each month? Instead of feeling grateful for news of new releases or great reads, I started feeling a bit anxious, like I was always behind the eight ball. I want my romance reading hobby to continue to be an oasis from stress, a way to relax and rejuvenate. I have managed this on my blog, somehow. I know other people manage it on Twitter, but I just couldn’t shut out the noise.
They say you should set goals for your tweeting, so you don’t get overwhelmed. I finally figured out that I personally don’t have any goals that Twitter can help me meet. Quite the reverse, actually.
I’m already regretting that I can’t tweet with @RedRobinReader and @ScarletCorset about tonight’s True Blood episode, and there are some folks I love to tweet with that I won’t get a chance to interact with now (they don’t comment on blogs, but are available on Twitter), but for now, at least, it’s the right choice for me.
What do you say? Do you tweet? Why or why not? What do you get out of it? Have you found ways to make your Twitter experience better?
