16 thoughts on “For the full experience, follow me on Twitter”

1. Mark Stewart October 25, 2011 at 7:48 pm

   As I don’t have adult ADHD, I find it difficult to be a Twitter follower.

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2. Doug Ross October 26, 2011 at 8:30 am

   @mark

   Agreed. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the stream of consciousness above. Who was saying what when and why?

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3. Doug Ross October 26, 2011 at 8:31 am

   I suppose we will have gone full circle when people end up tweeting in Morse code.

   .. -.. — .. (LOL!)

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4. bud October 26, 2011 at 9:39 am

   Or smoke signals.

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5. Brad October 26, 2011 at 10:54 am

   Mark, I felt the same way you did about it. Well, not the SAME way, but I did see it as pointless and having too much in common, as a form of communication, with bumper stickers. I thought the form invited dangerous oversimplification of thought.

   Then one day Tim Kelly — of “Crack the Bell” and “Indigo Journal” — said something to me one day that convinced me to try it: “You can use it to promote your blog.” How, I asked. He said just post the blog headlines, with the links, on Twitter (and, automatically, no Facebook as well).

   I tried it, and today I have four-to-five times the traffic I had before on the blog.

   Of course, that’s not a selling point for you. But this may be: I found that I loved it. First, I loved the literary challenge of working within the 140-character limit. It was a fun sort of discipline, which I likened at first to writing haiku. But that’s not quite right. I liked it because it played to a personal strength I’ve had since I started doing it professionally 36 years ago: writing headlines. It was good to flex those muscles again.

   Next, and this will more pertinent to you, it’s not as facile and shallow as you may think. Not if it links to more substantial material. And it does, sometimes to MUCH more substantial material, fascinating stuff you would not find otherwise find.

   Yes, there are people who Tweet out nothings, or tease you with links that lead to something no more substantial than the Tweet. But you learn not to follow those people. You follow substantial news and commentary feeds, from The New York Times, the BBC, the New Yorker, The New Republic, and on and on.

   You find fascinating people with interesting things to say, people you’d never heard of before. The intellectual banquet can be substantial, and you will have a breadth of familiarity with what is happening out in the world, and what is being said about it, than you can possibly get from any other medium.

   I urge you to try it, and give it a real chance. You’ll find it’s not what you expected.

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6. Brad October 26, 2011 at 11:01 am

   And Doug — I accept service on the typography. It’s much clearer if you simply follow the link to my timeline. By quoting, I was trying to entice y’all to come over and look, but I guess I did it in a lame way.

   I can’t seem to copy and paste Tweets over to my blog without it losing the layout that makes them easy to follow. The avatars help. So does the spacing. So do other symbols and devices that provide clarity, but which do not copy over.

   I have in the past posted Tweets and forced them to look more or less as they should, but that takes a certain amount of fiddling with each and every one of them, and I just can’t devote that kind of time.

   If I could just find a good, really good, Twitter feed that would work in the rail of my blog — one that would look like Twitter itself — that would help a lot. But I haven’t managed that yet. The last time I had such a feature in my sidebar, it was as ugly and hard to follow as the above, and it was about 12 hours behind — which was pointless.

   And when I discovered software that would integrate Twitter with my comment threads — I was really excited about that one, because it would have greatly increased participation and interactivity here — it crashed my blog, as the versions were incompatible.

   I’ll continue to search for a better way, because to me, the Twitter feed and the blog are part of the same thing. Twitter is continuing to blog by other means when I’m not in a position to sit down with the laptop. I want to get them to work together seamlessly.

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7. Jesse S. October 26, 2011 at 12:18 pm

   3.2.1 or an earlier version?

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8. `Kathryn Fenner October 26, 2011 at 1:37 pm

   I’m with Mark and Doug. If I wanted to read your Tweets, I’d figure out my Twitter password.

   I wonder if Twitter isn’t exacerbating your alleged ADHD.

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9. Brad October 26, 2011 at 2:53 pm

   Did you say something? I wasn’t paying attention…

   But seriously, those of us who are ADD (not ADHD) do get a bit of a rush out of that kind of stimulation — jumping from topic to topic to topic. And to an observer, it can look like a flat stone skimming over water. But again I say, the real pleasure comes from plunging under, down deep, into something you would NOT have found if you hadn’t been skimming over a vast field of topics, looking for that likely topic to get into deeply.

   It’s quite satisfying on a number of levels.

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10. Brad October 26, 2011 at 3:02 pm

    And I find that on the days I’m paying attention to Twitter, I’m more up on the news — a broad range of news — than I’ve been since I used to be in charge of deciding what went onto the front page and in the rest of the news pages of the paper. I did that at three different papers.

    But back then, it was a matter of keeping up with the local news budget — which was usually drawn up once during the cycle, then was a matter of being updated by several editors as things changed in their respective areas, and keeping up with basically four wire feeds — state, national, world and political.

    With Twitter, I’m constantly being updated by whichever of 619 feeds has posted most recently. It’s the proverbial information fire hose, only it’s forced to give me one item at a time, every few seconds.

    True, a lot of those are people I follow for fun, or people just repeating and batting back and forth the talking points of the day, but I’m also getting the feeds of every legitimate, serious news source in the world that I might ever be interested in following.

    It’s a very rich flow, and not to be missed. Don’t be Luddites, friends. Give it a chance…

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11. Doug Ross October 26, 2011 at 3:52 pm

    Maybe because I read pretty quickly I don’t have a problem with reading a couple paragraphs instead of “@Somebody Hey you should read this http://ww.sjdhd.$353mj,.”

    I bounce around from the Yahoo front page to Andrew Sullivan to Salon to Slate to BardWarthen to FitsNews to The State (once a day) and I get more than my fill of what is going on.

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12. Mark Stewart October 26, 2011 at 4:16 pm

    Luddite’s would abhor blogging.

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13. Brad October 26, 2011 at 4:48 pm

    Would they abhor it, or eschew it?

    Doug, thanks for reminding me. I wasn’t following Andrew Sullivan on Twitter.

    Make that 620. That I’m following, I mean. (Meanwhile, 1,460 are following me.)

    And that’s a much richer pool of information than the handful of sources you’re citing.

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14. `Kathryn Fenner October 26, 2011 at 5:48 pm

    ADD brains process things differently from the norm. I understand ADD people actually function better in a noisy, distracting environment–with, say, music playing and so on. So Twitter is made for you.

    I, who seem to have Attention Surplus Disorder, find it like cocktail party chatter when people have had a few–lots of disjointed one-liners declaimed to the masses, rather than genuine listening and thoughtful commentary, such as many of the commenters here provide.

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15. Brad October 26, 2011 at 6:28 pm

    That’s interesting, but I don’t know that it’s correct. I can ENJOY an environment where a lot is going on, but if you want me to get work done, I need to shut it all out — precisely because I am very easily fascinated, and thus distracted.

    I suffered for years in a newsroom environment. Finally, in editorial, I achieved what I had needed to concentrate — a really isolated office at the end of a long hall well separated from the rest of the building, with very few distractions.

    Unfortunately… by this time, we were using PCs, and we were connected to the Internet…

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16. `Kathryn Fenner October 26, 2011 at 6:46 pm

    Have you been formally diagnosed?

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