Aug 17, 2009
I use 140 characters to express my ideas; you use thousands. So who’s self-obsessed?
When ultra-critics of Twitter spend hundreds and hundreds of words expressing their thoughts about stuff, I have to ask: Who’s the narcissist?
* * *
Related:
Well said.
lol Touche.
(pretend that has the accent where it’s supposed to)
There’s no necessary link between self-expression and narcissism, of course.
It isn’t nessecarily the number of words that indicates narsicism but the content of those words.
Many or few may be equally good or bad.
narcissism, I meant…
I ran an anti-Twitter post myself a few months ago and have since joined Twitter. Yes, I’ve been formulating an updated post explaining why…thanks Abraham, this helps!
Good point.
Especially when the tirade is a polemic against all the tweeting.
and sometimes, you only use 22 characters. all the twitter haters can put THAT in their pipe and smoke it!
btw, i have a love-hate relationship with all social networks and things internet-related.
Word or character count misses the point. It is that the world must know the minutiae of your existence that is the fundamental problem. Twitter just facilitates this by not leaving more space to fill. When the limit is reached, fulfillment can be felt and so reinforcing the narcissism.
also, Twitter allows you to connect to people you admire or think are interesting. I love that I can follow literary agents, writers, thinkers and preachers on Twitter. I’m interested in what *they* have to say. And I don’t really care if they follow me.
Although, if you have like 300 followers and yet, you follow no-one–might that be a little narcissism?
[...] I use 140 characters to express my ideas; you use thousands. So who’s self-obsessed? [...]
I like this blog, but this is a brilliant example of non sequitur. Abigail, above, said it well: “It isn’t necessarily the number of words that indicates narcissism but the content of those words.” I absolutely agree with her.
I agree: polemics against such things can be (and oftentimes are) equally as trivial as hearing a tweet that someone “just ate a muffin – and yum!” But does it matter at all?
As I grow, I become less and less desirous to accuse someone of narcissism – especially when it floods my veins with greater perspicuity than any semblance of humility. I wonder if it’s just easier to gripe and poke at something rather than just ignore its rightful (and probably short) place in this world.
Expressing one’s thoughts is not the definition of narcissism. Thinking you’re so important that the world has to know what you ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner just might be. The argument against twitter is that it’s limitation on characters combined with the central theme of “What are you doing right now?”, tends to encourage the trivial instead of the significant and thought provoking. That said many blogs are also trivial and narcissistic.
The problem with this argument is that “the central theme of ‘What are you doing right now?’” is almost universally ignored by most regular Twitter users.
Anybody else notice the irony of using New Media to point out how narcissistic New Media is?
I agree–the ultra-critics need to come up with new arguments, or at least new means of arguing.
[...] just 22 words, Abraham Piper responds to critics of [...]