Social media and me, Part I: Why I really like Twitter

I think of my cousin Buck as what technology watchers call an early adapter. On the younger end of the baby boomer demographic, he has always been quick to use and acquire what’s new, from cell phones in the early 1990s to web-enabled wristwatches in the early 2000s. My son still remembers using Buck’s watch to look up the temperature during a Rockies game in July of 2005 (he discovered it was 106 degrees).

So when my literary agent urged me to sign up for Twitter, I figured Buck would be one of the few personal contacts I’d find already there. Most of my friends love Facebook, a technology I’ve diligently avoided. (“Once I find time to read the New York Times cover to cover every day, I’ll consider Facebook,” I always say when asked. Could still happen.) But so far, my social cohort hasn't been drawn in by Twitter, which resulted in a somewhat inscrutable exchange with my mother-in-law in which I said, “Not everyone is using Twitter. My friends don’t use Twitter.” She replied, “Well, your friends aren’t everyone!” “No,” I said, a little bit puzzled, “but they’re someone. So if they’re not using it, everyone can’t be.” These who’s-on-first exchanges are not altogether uncommon in our family.)

But Buck wasn't there. At least I couldn't find him. So I e-mailed him directly to ask him why he wasn’t on Twitter, and he admitted he didn’t quite understand how to use it. Or why.

This is how I felt a month ago, but in the past three weeks I’ve become something of a convert. For a writer, Twitter, with its severely abstemious limit of 140 characters including punctuation marks and spaces, is a terrific challenge in editorial self-discipline. I have trouble keeping my personal-essay columns to 800 words and my feature stories under 1,000 words: expressing a thought, even just one singular thought, cogently in 140 characters gives my editing skills a workout and has succeeded to do what no other medium could: taught me to eliminate adverbs. Can I really tell an anecdote about the kids, narrate a weekend excursion or describe a run in 140 characters? Why, what do you know: it turns out I can, when I absolutely have to.

I also like the quick-update format of Twitter. So often, events catch my attention but don’t seem to merit an actual letter or e-mail to anyone. It’s not that I’m too lazy to write it out; it’s that I’m not sure the event is worthy of taking up my reader’s time. E-mailing a friend or relative directly about, say, Holly learning to ride a bike or my first experience baking no-knead bread presupposes their interest in the topic. Posting a one-sentence “Tweet” informing them that Holly has mastered her two-wheeler or that the bread was a success doesn’t seem nearly as presumptuous. Conversely, I would love to get frequent brief updates from my friends and family members about those events they don’t bother to write to me about. For example, when I reached my cousin Buck by e-mail, he told me about bringing his eldest son to college last month. Had I not initiated the contact, he wouldn’t have bothered to write to me about that, and yet I was definitely interested. And probably so would everyone else who would choose to follow him on Twitter.

Moreover, despite the misconceptions of many non-users, Twitter isn’t just for letting your friends know when you’re about to eat a sandwich or have a new favorite song. It’s ideal for passing along articles and information pertinent to a particular topic. For example, I’m on the mailing list of an acquaintance who is deeply involved in the health care debate and frequently sends all his contacts links to articles about legislative actions and related news. Because you can use Twitter to forward links to items published elsewhere on line, he’d be well-advised to use this method to keep his friends informed, and he’d probably find it easy to build his mailing list as more people interested in the topic found their way to his posts.

And that brings me to another advantage of Twitter: I don’t have to decide who will be interested in what I have to say, because it’s opt-in on the reader’s part. Followers choose to subscribe to the Twitterer’s feed. Normally, whenever any of my essays or articles are published, I send the link to dozens of friends, colleagues and relatives, knowing it’s self-promotional of me but figuring they have the prerogative to ignore it. If they were all Twitter users, it would be their choice to “follow” me, thereby finding out via Twitter when I’ve just published something. And it’s also their prerogative not to follow me, so I’d no longer have to wonder whether to include them in my self-promotions or not.

Nonetheless, at this point most of my friends are still not Twitterers, though a small number have obligingly joined since I did. Naturaly, I still love long talks and good face-to-face visits, but I also like 140-character nuggets of information. If you haven't tried it yet and want to take a look, just go to my Twitter feed at www.Twitter.com/NancySWest, and then let me know what you think!