Life without Twitter
For a number of reasons I decided to take a break from Twitter - some of you out there may moan "not again!" as I've taken social hiatuses before.
But, with the way 2016 has been, and things going on in my life offline, I decided to step away. So, on December 1st I stopped tweeting1, uninstalled the app from my phone and took the drastic step of deleting all 13K plus of my old tweets.
I needed to reevaluate how and why I was using the network and, as Twitter is "live", when/if I return I considered the old tweets to be largely irrelevant.
For now, however, I decided to live life without Twitter, but there's a catch:
It doesn't exist!
Twitter is where people go to announce and denounce, congratulate and complain, celebrate and mourn.
News happens ON Twitter and gets reported elsewhere - you can't avoid it. Journalists no longer need to conduct interviews and seek out sound bites, they just fire up Twitter and write their stories 140 characters at a time. Tech press, mainstream media, it doesn't matter; exposure to Twitter (or at least tweets) is now almost universal.
The amount of coverage it gets is grossly disproportionate compared to the likes of Facebook with a much larger active user base. It just illustrates how wrong active users is as a benchmark for how vital a service actually is.
Twitter flows through the veins of modern culture. Even if you're not tweeting, don't visit the site or use the app, it is always there.
- with the exception of a tweet on 26th December commemorating the 10th anniversary of joining ↩
