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it’s pretty easy to compare messages sent by various mass media outlets via twitter. it’s also pretty surprising how they spin the same information in different ways.

update: mainstream media never fails to disappoint. an hour after posting this, CBC went live with the actual story, in line with how the Herald spun it on their first try. sigh.

what is it with twitter that makes people forget how to find things on their own, or how to communicate using any other medium? I now refuse to respond to tweet messages that are essentially “I’m too lazy to google, but am hoping you can google for me” or “I want an answer, but don’t want to read the tonnes of great, in-depth resources available online. please spoonfeed me.”

fracking twitter.

I don’t remember when the last time was that the front page of my blog only went back 3 days. I’m definitely blogging more after dropping out of twitterville. Definitely having more fun with the blog, anyway.

I still don’t miss twitter one bit – but I’m finding that I do miss the sense of connection to many of the people that I saw primarily on twitter… I’m finding I get bursts of realtime communication – sometimes people pop up via IM – and smaller bursts of asynchronous – emails, flickr photos, blog posts… Maybe that’s a healthier mix, rather than the constant flood of quasisynchronous updates.

I deleted my twitter account. After posting almost 11,000 tweets over a year and a half. And I don’t miss it. I don’t regret it.

Twitter is a strange, unique beast. At first blush, it’s a tool to connect people and to share information.

But that’s not really what twitter is, at all.

Twitter is probably one of the most powerful experiments in behaviorist conditioning ever crafted. Neither Pavlov’s dogs nor Skinner’s pigeons were as well trained as the thousands of people madly clicking refresh refresh refresh refreshrefreshrefreshREFRESH in the hopes of scoring a quick high from fresh information (or worse – using the desktop apps that display the updates instantly).

What twitter claims to do, it does astonishingly well. Ad hoc informal groups, defined and refined by each member according to the people they are interested in. No other service provides quite the same level of transparent control and flexibility for each and every individual.

But when I post a tweet, or read someone else’s, it is not as it seems. It feels as though there is some form of tight connection, a baring of souls, a bond. But that’s not possible, given the limit of 140 bytes of ASCII text.

Which means that twitter is really nothing more than a giant plastic piano, with it’s members the chickens obsessively pecking at keys until food pellets are released. We’re not aware of the keys, the piano, nor of the song we’re being trained to play.

I keep coming back to one thing. Who is paying for twitter, and why? It’s not advertising. At least Facebook is clearly partially financed by advertising revenue.

The only value I see in twitter, from a financial point of view, that even comes close to justifying the expense if providing the service, is to teach The Machine. The constant tweeting, linking, geopositioning updates are providing a vast database which can then be mined. But why, and by whom?

So I decided to opt out of this strange experiment.

One thing I’ve found is that by removing myself from the Pavlovian update/response feedback loop, I feel as though my thinking is clearer. I’m more present. I’m not constantly distilling my life into 140 character chunks, nor am I constantly wondering if there are any @dnorman tweets waiting for me.

Another thing I find is that I now use richer and deeper channels of communication. I’m not trying to stuff conversations into short asynchronous segments. I’m talking in realtime via IM. I’m communicating in more depth via email. I’m writing more and better blog posts.

One thing that surprised me is the reaction from people. Some seem to think this is some extreme or scary act. How could someone possibly delete their twitter account? wow!

But twitter is just a website. It’s not even my website. Someone else’s website. Nothing more. Deleting the account means absolutely nothing. Anyone that is truly interested in knowing what I’m doing will use any of the countless other channels (like, for instance, my blog posts) to find out. Anyone that really cares about what I’m doing is already connected to me on so many other channels that dropping the connection via twitter will have no effect.

So long, twitter. It’s been fun. But I need to stop pecking keys and waiting for food pellets.

now that I’m not obsessively hitting refresh on twitter.com I seem to have so much more free time online. It sounds silly, but my “check in” process used to hang on twitter, and now it only takes a couple of minutes to check in on everyone and everything I care about…

I just deleted my twitter account. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not looking for reactions. I’m not dropping out. I’m still online, still available, and still easily contacted via better channels. If you need to contact me, try the contact form on my blog, or IM (dnorman@mac.com), or Skype (dlnorman), email (contact at darcynorman.net), etc… I’ll likely write more about why I deleted my twitter account, but for now it’s just gone.

I just deleted Twinkle from my iPod Touch, too. I don’t like feeling addicted.

the twitter-checking compulsion is too strong. I’ve modified my hosts files again so twitter only exists on my iPod Touch.

twitter’s starting to feel unhealthy again. I’m not going to quit outright. That didn’t work last time. What I’m going to try is restricting my Twitter contact to just my iPod Touch. No browser-based Twittering. That should pretty much regulate things without having to do anything drastic.

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