Say what you will about Twitter — I certainly have and will again — but the idea of having hundreds or even thousands of “followers” is a little bit intoxicating. Intoxicating like a fine Merlot or intoxicating like crack remains a debating point, but there’s no denying the psychological impact of a large audience, in any endeavour.

Or at least, the ILLUSION of a large audience.

Sure, when Ashton or Demi or whatever big stars delight us with their latest non-event — “This lineup is taking forever- I need my latte” I’m sure the response is voluminous, immediate, and just as inane. If you have a million followers, all you need is a response rate of a tenth of a percent, and you got a thousand replies.

I wonder how many they read…

When you’re a schmuck like me with just a couple hundred followers or so, the numbers are not so kind at propping up my self-esteem to Hollywood proportions. But there WOULD often be some response. A star here, an RT there, an LOL by DM. (See, I know me some lingo).

It became the goal to nurture that response, to play to expectations, to give as I got, to embrace the notion of having followers.

My first post on Twitter, date January 31, 2009, reads:

[robertgdaniel] is wondering if he really wants “followers”…

It seems I did manage to grow comfortable the concept, at least somewhat. The idea that people might find what you’re saying interesting or provocative enough to actually respond to, well, that’s almost as intoxicating as having a real conversation…

One of the biggest problems with Twitter (though some would call it a feature, not a bug) is that messages are constrained to 140 characters. So it becomes awkward, if not impossible, to make larger points with the eloquence that they may or may not deserve.

I have decided I no longer have time in my life for Twitter. Given that I’m retired, this may seem counter-intuitive. I guess I’m saying I no longer want to SPEND my time on Twitter.

Since becoming unemployed in the traditional sense, I’ve become (perhaps ironically) more aware of the value of time spent, and the finite nature of that time. Even if I choose to just take naps and watch TV with my time, if that removes a source of stress, of frustration, of depression, then I’m better off.

As it happens, I do have enough time and energy (energy being the dearer commodity) to include a FEW things besides napping and watching TV — for example some woodworking, some musical stuff maybe, off and on… and the dogs can keep you busy… but I’ve decided that cracking wise on Twitter no longer makes the cut.
I’m eventually going to be writing up an analysis of both Twitter and Facebook (working title: “Why Facebook and Twitter, Collectively, Both Suck AND Blow”) and I am also curtailing my Facebook presence as of now. But this post is about Twitter.

After a year or so on Twitter, I have 370 followers, and am following 211 others. I WAS following about twice that many, because early information from the so-called Twitterati suggested that was the way to do it. Get as many followers as possible by following as many as possible.

Those people are douchebags, though, as it turns out, and couldn’t be more misguided.

But I digress.

Of the two hundred or so accounts I still follow (down from four or five hundred at one point), probably half of these are of the “news” or “announcement” type. Impersonal, corporate accounts with just quick links to breaking news in that field.

A big chunk of what remains are semi-personal accounts. They may be bloggers or authors or minor celebrities (I long ago dumped actual celebrities), and their posts do have a personal feel, but at the end of the day they are pushing their own agenda, and not terribly interested in trading quips with the likes of you and me. If they follow you back at all, you get the sense that it’s just a formality.

If someone is following more than a couple of hundred people, the chance of you even being noticed by them becomes remote-to-zero.

Which leaves a small handful of like-minded individuals, with no particular personal, professional, or corporate AGENDA to push, who are just having some laughs and trying to interact with each other.

Twitter, just by virtue of the parameters of its design, makes meaningful interaction VERY difficult to have real conversations. The interactions are of necessity short, or are supplanted entirely by the awarding of stars or FAV’s.

I just got finished shedding a whole superfluous virtual world of meaningless token-giving (a Flickr awards group I admin’d for a long time) and here I was getting all obsessive about a whole new version of the same thing. Minus the photographs.

So on the one hand, I’m VERY grateful for the interactions I did manage to wring out of the frustratingly limited Twitter structure… some VERY funny people gave some good laughs, and I like to think I contributed a little to the zeitgeist my own self.

But in the end, I found it unsustainable. And after a couple of you tweeps had meltdowns online, a process I’m not unfamiliar with, I realized I had to bail. For my own sanity.

I won’t be shutting anything down, as such, but I won’t be tweeting* much, if at all, or monitoring things with any regularity. (*The beginning of the end may have been, come to think of it, when I started using words like “tweeting” without the snort of dersion that always used to follow…)

So there you have it, thanks for all the fish. I’m available via email or this website for those who’d like to keep in touch. I really do appreciate the laughs. Cheers.

Bob.
twitter.com/robertgdaniel