An Experiment in Scotch

I joined Twit­ter in August of this year with­out a great deal of thought and after long decry­ing the effect I was sure it had on atten­tion. I did it mostly because there are usu­ally 5–10 times a day when I have a thought or see a link that don’t war­rant a full blog post but that I find inter­est­ing enough to want to share it with peo­ple. I tried Face­book orig­i­nally but that didn’t really feel like what Face­book is about. Twit­ter on the other hand seemed to be per­fectly designed for that sort of activ­ity. So I joined up and started updat­ing pretty regularly.

For my pur­poses, Twit­ter was excel­lent. A major­ity of my updates were links to some­thing that seemed inter­est­ing enough to share. Other times, I’d have a thought that seemed Twit­ter wor­thy and based on the responses I got from peo­ple who fol­lowed me, about 25% of them actu­ally were. Over the course of my time on Twit­ter, I updated 373 times or about 4 times a day. I got 159 replies to my updates. I was fol­low­ing 37 peo­ple and being fol­lowed by 47. I was happy with Twit­ter and Twit­ter seemed happy with me.

Unfor­tu­nately, there was a darker side. I already have issues with atten­tion and focus. I LOVE any­thing that gives me a dopamine fix. Twit­ter was rapidly becom­ing a dopamine fix. My real writ­ing com­pletely dropped off the map. I wrote 9 posts total in 2 months on my tech blog and this one. Sev­eral of the posts on my tech blog were almost Twitter-like in their brevity. I was doing no fic­tion writ­ing and no jour­nal writ­ing. I began to notice that I was check­ing Twit­ter 5–10 times a day, even on days when I left Tweet­Deck turned off. When I updated and didn’t get a response, there was a dis­tinct men­tal reac­tion in that I didn’t get any feed­back. This caused me to update more.

My focus at home on projects was nil and I had trou­ble get­ting into any­thing. When­ever I got stuck on some­thing, off I went to check Twit­ter updates. Twit­ter taught me that I don’t have the dis­ci­pline nec­es­sary to turn off Twit­ter when I needed to be work­ing on some­thing else.

On top of all that, I started think­ing about what the result was of all this *effort* I was putting into Twit­ter. There was noth­ing mean­ing­ful going on. In 2 months, I had 1 con­ver­sa­tion that could be con­sid­ered inter­est­ing and pro­duc­tive. I pro­duced noth­ing that I’d want any­one to remem­ber me by, noth­ing use­ful to the greater good. The irony of my rea­son­ing for join­ing Twit­ter is that even though I was post­ing things that I found inter­est­ing, none of them led to greater, more in-depth con­ver­sa­tion or learn­ing. They were just infor­ma­tional junk, no dif­fer­ent from the junk mail that I get every day. Things that I thought were inter­est­ing were really just infor­ma­tion junk mail, even if peo­ple vol­un­tar­ily signed up to get it from me.

None of this is a judg­ment on Twit­ter. I actu­ally think it is quite use­ful as a mini-RSS reader in a way, a tool that some­one might use to suc­cess­fully mar­ket or pro­mote a busi­ness or a blog. I wish I could use it for that. Twit­ter did drive my view­ing stats up on my tech blog from 1 a day to 9 a day on those days I men­tioned a post on Twit­ter. I just don’t have the abil­ity to com­part­men­tal­ize Twit­ter the tool from Twit­ter the dopamine provider. I don’t want to look back on 12 months of Twit­ter and won­der why in the hell I didn’t write more in that time period. I want to pro­duce things and that takes focus and atten­tion, some­thing Twit­ter increas­ingly was steal­ing away from me. I have a lim­ited store of atten­tion and the more I divided it hop­ing to hear that stu­pid lit­tle Tweet­Deck noti­fi­ca­tion sound, the less I had to pour into some­thing that actu­ally mat­tered. I really do want more than the pale fac­sim­ile of fulfillment.

Cross posted at Men­tal Pandiculation