In defense of Twitter

While businesses and professionals have embraced Twitter as the new revolution, the news and entertainment media have been quick to dismiss the service as a superfluous addition to the smorgasbord that lies before my generation of techno-wastrels. Everybody from CNN to The Daily Beacon is accusing "tweets" of marginalizing organized thought and perpetuating the myth that minutiae matters.

Well, the time has come for an honest and decent man to give the ubiquitous microblog a helping hand.

To begin, some questions: Is Twitter a vice, one of which to be ashamed? Is it hurting anybody? Would staging an intervention be appropriate? If congressmen stopped tweeting, would the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come to a halt? Would North Korea cease the launch of their satellite / missile? Would the economy stop its seemingly endless free-fall?

The answer to each question, of course, is an emphatic "No way, Jose!"

So how bad can it really be?

In defense of Twitter, it is a harmless outlet for the delusions of importance that every single human feels from time to time. From the actually important (Barack Obama, Bill Gates) to the faux-famous (Mark Zuckerberg) to the so-unimportant-that-they're-somehow-important (Paris Hilton), the endless stream of tweets, twitterers and followers is nothing more than an expression of freedom of speech.

Twitter has plenty of good qualities, too. For starters, it's absolutely, totally free. If you tweet from a computer, it's free. If you tweet from your iPhone, Blackberry or PDA, it's free---except for your monthly service, which you pay anyway and are unlikely to give up. If you tweet from a standard cell phone, it's free---standard text charges apply, but what the hell? Compose an update or two.

The next best thing? Absolutely nobody can force you to use it or update it. My journalism teachers recommended I get an account, so I did. Do I think it's kind of dumb? Sure---but nobody can accuse me of neglecting to follow orders. I have "device updates" turned off, so I am not bombarded 24/7 with "tinyurls" I can't even access on my basic cell phone. Essentially, it is just a bunch of status updates that I only check on a computer. No harm, no foul.

So if people want to pretend that other people actually follow them, go ahead. I'm not part of Gawker's "Twitterati," nor do I want to be. Maybe people Facebook-stalk me; maybe they follow my few tweets; maybe they read my blog...or maybe they don't. This blog is no more legitimate than my own Twitter account, except that it is more well-written and thoughtful (I hope), and longer than 140 characters.

The point is, Twitter is not hurting anybody. Except, of course, the rare update-whore who gets his fix during class or a board meeting. But if it wasn't Twitter, it might be something else more dangerously addictive, like Facebook's Scramble or online Sudoku.

Twitter = my anti-drug