I recently shared the photo above on Twitter with Eric Young, Jr. I tweeted this: “Hey, @EYJr I know I’m extremely late on this, but thought you’d like this cool photo I got of you 3 Young men.”
Two hours later, he tweeted this: “@EksAxis I appreciate it. Thankyou”
To anyone who exists in 2013 still badmouthing Twitter (and they exist – I work with many of these people), I’m here to tell you that you’re a fucking imbecile. Twitter has changed the way we communicated, and that change, understood from a macro perspective, is a change for good.
I can understand talking shit about Twitter in, say, 2007. We didn’t know what Twitter was supposed to be in 2006 or 2007, one year after its launch. So you had people trying all sorts of different things to share. Hence, you got a lot of what people are eating for lunch, people announcing when they were heading to the gym, and a whole lot of navel gazing pointlessness.
But it’s six years later. Everyone is better at everything with six years of practice. Twitter, like anything else, is totally opt-in, and thus, entirely what you make of it. I don’t follow anyone I dislike except for one guy, who annoys me in such a comedic way, I love to read his tweets and go, “God I hate this guy!” several times a day just to amuse myself. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine who this person is because I certainly don’t want to destroy the elegant, annoying beauty of his insufferable feed.
Everyone else is someone I generally enjoy for one (or several) of a variety of reasons. I never remember to Favorite enough of my favorite tweets, so here are but a sampling of great ones.
Here is Kyle Kinane hilariously summarizing basically every ad for Pace Picante ever created.
This is one of the single best absurdist non-sequitirs I’ve ever read.
Here’s the response to me annoying a Gonzaga fan I know after they got bounced from the NCAA Tournament by Wichita State.
And here’s a time capsule to the first time anything I’ve created got mentioned in a mainstream news article.
I regularly exchange tweets during UFC fights with the greatest MMA writer alive. I had a funny exchange with a local comedian when I realized we were getting our haircut right next to each other.
I have opted into a content delivery service that feeds me fresh one liners from funny people I would have never even known existed like him and like her.
And I was able to share a photo with Eric Young, Jr. of his own family that he would have never otherwise seen. That’s a cool communication tool. And as it continues to evolve, my hope is that our interconnectedness helps us all become the people we ultimately want to be.
Tweet on. And follow me.
While I don’t disagree with your points most of how popular media (tv) uses twitter annoys the piss out of. I can’t watch anything without a live twitter feed. Personally I don’t give a single fuck what @stankypussy69 thinks about anything let alone some crappy reality tv show I am watching to remind myself how much better I am than the @stankpussy69s of the world. Twitter also ruined my experience of the 2012 NFL draft. I had to listen to it on the radio and instead of analysyis it was just a rundown of Mel Kiper and Jason Laconfora’s twiiter feeds. I would add more but my 140 characters are up.
Totally agree with you on the tv thing. I too despise the live tweets underneath a show. But that’s not really a problem with twitter, per se. That’s yet another problem with television trying to figure out what we want and forcing it upon us. By displaying tweets from John and Jane Q. Mouthbreather Bumblefuck, they destroy the opt-in nature of twitter. If I wanted to follow any of those people, I would. If I wanted to live chat with strangers about whatever this show is, again, I would. But tv gives me no say, and I agree, twitter used in this way creates a product that pleases no one.