There’s Something About Twitter

Conversation with friend while randomly walking around the neighborhood:

Friend (very, very curious): So you met these people on Twitter?
Me (not liking where this is going): Yeah.
Friend (jeers): I thought you were smarter than that.
Me (offended): Whaddayamean? What’s that sposta mean?
Friend (now choosing his words carefully): I mean, it’s just so…16…
- Long pause -
Me (defeated): Yeah, I guess it is, isn’t it?

I have had variants of this conversation with at least three friends over the past week. I met all of them at university, or college, or through some place that wasn’t – you know – virtual. In all these exchanges that have been enlightening, defensive, accusatory and mocking by turn, I have been telling my friends about my other group of friends.

Let me rephrase that.

In these conversations, I have been trying to tell my “real” friends about my “virtual” friends. By the latter, I refer to real, flesh-and-blood people I have never met in real life. Or have met online and then met in real life, you know? You don’t? Oh well.

If this trend is a bad thing, then I have Twitter to blame for it. On no other social networking website would I ever add strangers to my list or do whatever else the equivalent of “following” people is. I am selective about who I add to my Facebook list, and had an equally paranoid attitude about my now-dead Orkut account.

But good ol’ Twitter is another ballgame together. There’s something about it that urges you to go out and talk to random strangers. While everyone has their own reason, little psychotic me has this: I have very little information about myself put up on Twitter so I feel safe talking to whoever. Sure, sure, I know it’s not hard to track me, or anyone else, down on The World Wide Web. But restricting information about myself in whatever little way I can helps me sleep peacefully at night  and lets me have free-flowing, engaging conversations with all my fellow tweeple by day.

I never really thought about it – talking to random strangers online was something we have all done at some deranged point in our teenage. But this, doing it at 23, it doesn’t feel deranged at all. It feels almost necessary. Like there’s a whole world out there made up of tweeple, and if you aren’t in on the conversation, you’re missing something. I’m well aware of how much of a melodramatic exaggeration this sounds like, but it’s got some truth to it. I thoroughly enjoy my (sometimes) hours-long conversations with my fellow tweeple, some of which are very enlightening. Sure, they may start with a “I had pasta for lunch” sort of tweet – the kind non-users curse Twitter for- but hey, these are the tweets that start the conversation! We will talk about pasta, our favorite places around town, how expensive/cheap they are, prices in general and so on. And the next thing we know, we are criticizing our phone plans.

There are all these wonderful people out there, and those I regularly converse with are just the tip of the iceberg. All these, and many more, have something interesting to say.If I need to regress mentally to listen to them, well then, I guess I’m 16 now, aren’t I? And might I add, a happier-in-her-own-paradise 16-year-old would be hard to find.

Image is taken from Jez.