who needs Twitter?

Jeez, I can do everything that site can and more. Just watch: Postman I'm sitting in my easy chair writing on my blog. 1 minute ago Postman I'm beginning to think the U.S. would be greatly improved if we excised both Hollywood and the District of Columbia and shoved them out to sea. 3 minutes ago Postman Just wandered past where my dad is watching baseball, wishing I knew a little more about professional sports. 10 minutes ago Postman Wandering around outside when it's pitch-dark out with no moon, nothing but the stars and the faint streak of the Milky Way above your head, and the occasional outburst of barking dogs way off in the darkness, is a surreal experience. 23 minutes ago Postman Sipping a martini with the folks while watching Deadly Women. 51 minutes ago Postman Well, I suppose I'd better get off this thing (and quit taking such fatuous Facebook quizzes as What Super Smash Bros. character are you?). 1 hour ago Postman Hmmm, Henry David Thoreau had some interesting things to say about fish in the sky, didn't he? 5 years ago Postman Doo doo ga ga boo boo? 22 years ago P'shaw. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Twitter's for twits. Micro-blogging strikes me as the stupidest thing to come out since...since...well, macro-blogging, actually. Who the hell cares what everybody else is doing or thinking on a minute-by-minute basis? For a long time now I've suspected that nobody on Blogger actually reads anybody else's blogs. Not really. They just sort of pop in from time to time, skim the first article that catches their eye, leave a superficial comment and scram. On the other hand, they pour hour after agonizing hour into crafting their own blog, in the vain hope that somebody's going to look at it. (That's what I do, anyway.) I'll bet that problem is only accentuated on Twitter. I'll just bet you everybody on there pours insane amounts of energy into posting updates (known as "Tweeting," as if the name "Twitter" wasn't damning enough) and none into actually reading anybody else's. I should bloody well hope that's what people do, anyway. What kind of craven, suppressed, inanimate sort of person would actively follow somebody's Tweets? What kind of nut are you to actually care what complete strangers are doing (unless, like me, they're reading good books, drinking strange cocktails, traveling to far-flung places and flying high-performance airplanes)? I think I should point out that I'm not bitter about the age I was born into. Okay, maybe a little. I really couldn't give a crap whether everybody in the world was texting on their cell phones, gaming on their Nintendo DS's, or Tweeting on their computers. I just wish that, for once, the telecommunications industry would stop innovating (if that's what it's called). Progress for the sake of progress is not progress. Just because everybody is doing something does not make it cool (ask the nearest lemming). All this electronic whiz-bang might make our lives a little more convenient, but not if we become slaves to it. Where's the mystery of life gone to? If we sat through every concert, every awards ceremony, every fireworks show, every lovemaking session and constantly Tweeted it all, there'd be no surprises left for anybody. And what more is there to life than surprises? Mystery? New things? Or at the very least, good old-fashioned mano a mano face-to-face person-to-person communication? Twitter is a bad idea. Blogging itself might potentially be as well (although it does allow me to say this). E-mail is abhorrent: I'll bet you in another twenty years nobody will even know what the phrase "snail mail" even means. The Internet is great at connecting people; nobody stopped to consider the people who didn't want to be connected. You know, let's just cut right to the chase. I don't even think we should've come down out of the trees. Our feet were on the ground, but our heads shot straight into the clouds...the thunderheads instead of those nice feathery cirrus formations at the edge of the stratosphere. Call me old-fashioned if you want. All I have to do is switch off this computer and you can't touch me. At least this world still has that much going for it.