God, I hate Twitter.
They say you either hate it or love it. I suppose it has its uses for deal-seekers (like myself) who enjoy the thrill of the hunt, in a Woot-Off kind of sense.
It’s South by Southwest here in Austin, TX, and the streets are filled with the usual LA transplants, here to share with their friends the social status they have from being backstage at the hottest shows. Too bad they’re so busy pushing little chiclet buttons on their phones that they can’t be bothered to pay attention to the music.
One of my clients is search engine optimization company Get Page One, where I do project management and content development. We often kick Twitter around as a topic of conversation. I understand that it lowers social barriers and allows you to keep tabs on celebs and powerful people. It’s Voyeurism 2.0. It’s public exhibitionism in 50 words or less. But in a pop-culture climate where I’m struggling to filter out the urgent from the important, Twitter is really the last kind of input that I want or need. I don’t care how many people are following you. Popularity contests sucked in high school; now they mean even less.
Twitter is blog-lite when I was already irritated by the frequent frothiness of blogs. Videogame writers are expected to be pretty froth-friendly, but ideally their work is closer to literature than to reality TV. If the medium is ever to aspire to being an art form, it needs to eschew froth. So far, comic books (Maus, Sandman, and yes, even the Watchmen movie) are a lot closer to reaching that status than videogames.
