Warning: This is Your Brain
. . .on Tweets
My brain was flitting like a fluorescent bulb about to burn out. That was the first warning. “This must be what it’s like to be unable to concentrate”, I thought.
I had learned how to get into a groove where I could literally write 300 tweets in one day. In effect I had trained my brain; rewired it to move from one topic to the next as quickly as possible. But now it was time to slow it way down. Prepare no more than 15 tweets a day and engage in networking for no more than one hour at a time.
I needed to start writing longer form, to force my brain to think about the same topic for hours instead of minutes; to make a second if not a third draft. I had realized it was time again for a thoughtful pace.
Learning how to tweet has been a journey with many dead-ends. I found myself at the painful receiving end of keeping a mind so open that my brains fell out… again and again. I read everything anyone said about Twitter and social media. I tried every technique and tool in an effort to find that sweet spot. That spot where I was as satisfied as a happy audience.
I discovered that people use Twitter in many different ways. Some consume; others create. Twitter is used for networking. It is used for broadcasting. Some accounts are all talk, all the time. Others post only links. If you like to talk, like I do, you will find Twitter a fascinating way to interact with a divergent diaspora. If you like to just lurk, I suspect that it is even more interesting!
A precious few master this literary short-form. Too many tweets are a series of indecipherable hieroglyphs. And there’s the so called Follow shoutouts—a collection of @usernames that more often than not group unrelated people together for no particular reason other than to just get their attention. It’s kind of like walking into a bar and just shouting out 10 names. Even more disturbing when the tweeter doesn’t follow you. These make my brain short-circuit the hardest, requiring a total reboot. Kind of takes the fun out of Fridays by sucking you into a black hole with no point.
Maybe I just paid too close attention. Possibly I tried too hard to really understand it all. Maybe my brain is just full and most tweets are the literary equivalent of junk food. Maybe this much pressing of the virtual flesh is just too much for this introvert. Maybe TweetDeck is just too shiny with all the list columns and interesting people tweeting things that take me on amazing journeys far afloat from my own islands of production.
Whatever the reason, whichever the mechanism, evidently I have watched one too many tweet streams all too closely and now brain ‘sploded. So excuse me why I indulge myself in a little bit of enjoying the voices in my own head. There’s a few scripts in there keen to come on the scene. Forgive me while I just talk to myself.
