#AdiosTwitter

#AdiosTwitter

 For my technology change, I chose to give up one of my social media apps and see what kind of difference it would make in my life.  I chose to delete Twitter. Although I would check Twitter fairly often, I would go to it more as a last resort if I had nothing else to look at. It was not my favorite app, and it honestly had been actually frustrating me. Only a small handful of my friends have accounts, and not even people that I am very close to. Therefore my feed consisted mostly of posts from celebrities, sports teams and “funny” accounts. My feed became incredibly repetitive due to the truly high speed of the Internet. Once a post went viral, I would see it time and time again pop up on my feed. It really starting boring me that all I was seeing was the same posts or spam, and started questioning why I even had a Twitter account, as I am not an active “tweeter.” It is extremely ironic that I was causing myself the opposite effect of what I had hoped to get out of Twitter. Instead of entertainment, I got boredom.

Other than the same old memes circulating through my feed, I started getting an extremely negative vibe from the site. Twitter appears to be the place to go to complain about your problems, and not do anything about them. For example, posts from my “friends” included small, meaningless rants about too much homework or how hot it was outside. Everything just seemed so negative.

It’s a strange thing to think about how tweeting about something can cause some sort of gratification. You tweet about your bad day at work and somehow think that it will make you feel better, yet nothing has changed. You can’t go back in time and change your day. You tweet about it. Why do we do this? I’m guilty of it myself, at times if I was angry I would tweet something if I had no one to talk to about it. 

Another thing about Twitter that drives me absolutely INSANE is the concept of “subtweeting.” Subtweeting is pretty much talking about someone behind their back, but in this case “behind their back” is just not mentioning their name (or twitter handle). This is by far one of the most passive-aggressive ways of handling conflict. Everyone always knows or has a good idea who the tweet is about, and it is just wrong to talk bad about someone for an entire audience of followers to see. I have been personally victimized by subtweeting, and can attest that it is a horrible feeling to be publicly criticized online in a way meant to be “stealthy,” yet is anything but.

So how has deleting Twitter affected me? I almost feel like a burden is lifted off my shoulders. I no longer have the urge to look at something that was not even entertaining or cause myself unneeded annoyance. Of course, no one was forcing me to look at Twitter. It was my own fault. It reminds me of discussions we have had about technology in our class. Just because the technology is there, doesn’t mean we have to use it. No one is making us use it; we have a choice. That is the key notion that we must understand in this day and age, you can choose to use technology and experience the effects of it or not. So deleting Twitter gave me a small feeling of liberation. In the eyes of an avid tweeter I went “against the norm,” which I am completely fine and happy with. So goodbye subtweets, trivial rants and repetitive memes…I’m free!