Social networking is to this generation as Walmart is to America. Everyone thinks we need it to survive. Granted, I probably spend more time on networking sites than the average bear, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that they have made us into extremely annoying people. The “new” fad (that’s really not new at all) is Twitter. It’s like in the last three months everyone discovered Twitter (despite how long it has been around). Anyway, a friend and I were discussing how much we miss the days when hardly no one used it. You’d wake up each morning, take a sip of your coffee and get delightful little updates from your friends about something wonderful in their lives.
Today, it has become the new facebook status, the new AIM away message, the new mood updater on myspace. Everyone has managed to take 140 characters and use it as a form of torture. I now wake up, grab my coffee and nearly choke on it as I read the 7000 updates from people that I shudder to claim to know. Twitter should be known as the barf generator. People just throw up garbage due to a virus known as “Tweeting”. Examples:
goin to the storeee.. be back latuh! so much fun wid da girls! woot woot!
5 minutes later..
at duh store wit ma girls! eatin bon bons and talkin bout joe jonas!
5 minutes later
leavin da store with ma ladies! we just bought all their gummy worms! yeeeah
I literally lose my cool when I see these things. Now that hashtags have come along, it’s like I woke up from a nightmare only to get trapped in a horror film. If you missed my rant about hashtags on facebook, I advise you check it out. Then there’s people who retweet everything. Why? If I wanted to read what Lady Gaga tweeted I would follow HER. Granted, the occasional retweet is great, I love inspiring snippets from wise people, but not every other second.
“Well, if you don’t like their tweets, don’t follow them!” Easier said than done, my friends. When someone follows you there is an unspoken obligation to follow them back (that is, if they’re someone you know in real life). It’s like facebook friend requests 2.0. If you don’t follow someone, they’re going to see that as “rejecting their friendship”. It’s twisted, I know.
140 characters to spit up whatever you want. So dangerous because now we have given one option and that is BAD GRAMMAR. Now people really DO have an excuse for using the letter “u” or the number 2 for “to”. For those of us who actually like to type things out and use punctuation, we are easily infuriated at the fact that we have to appear to lack intelligence in order to say what needs to be said. Granted, I can usually get out whatever I need to in 140 characters with correct grammar. Yet, for people who have to rant about how their mom is ruining their life and they just failed their math test and a link to their McDonalds talent page it gets a little stickier.
I love Twitter, but I hate what comes along with anything when it gets overused and abused. When people start putting up mirror pics or playing farm games on it, you can bet that I will be searching for an undiscovered, pure and adulterated social networking site to move to.
ASHLIN BOYLES 
totally with you here Ashlin, Twitter seems to be narcissist’s best friend.
It has its usefulness in small doses, for me, its like going to a library and looking at the spines of a book, and seeing an interesting title (<140 characters) that makes you want to pull it out and look at the link (or author) in more detail.
But too often, its used by people like Stephen Fry to tell the whole world that they have bought some new trousers.
Ash, you should try Google+. No one uses it yet, despite Google’s many efforts to advertise it. I think you would enjoy it very much, and I would definitely + you if you decide to utilize it. (It is literally a “+” instead of a “plus” by the way, hahaha) I literally skim my news feed these days just because there are people who want to post the mundane. I don’t have a Twitter account and I probably will not get one due to all the reasons you just vented about. I could not agree with you more.