No Twitter!

I get why Twitter is useful, and why people like it. Twitter links people and interest groups and communities. It's accessible to people in small places and big places. It hopes to influence what is being talked about around the world.

Despite all this positive-sounding stuff, I don't want to Twitter. I consented (willingly) to a cellphone and a Facebook account, and I still feel pangs of remorse at being part of these large, faceless, privacy-sucking entities.

Maybe I'm a luddite, or a slow adapter, or just plain uncool. I do have visions of ending up in a cave somewhere scratching my head and trying to make fire while everyone else on earth is exchanging the minutiae of their daily lives through chips implanted in their forearms.

But then I also have visions of being one of the last free persons on earth with access to privacy, walking through the wilderness while others are shackled in techno-dungeons thinking they are enjoying a picnic in a rainforest when really they are just viewing said repast on a screen.

Don't get me wrong - it's not like I think I would be the only one walking through the wilderness, that I have some kind of superior knowledge that would allow me to remain immune to being shackled in a techno-dungeon. I just know that I don't want to be accessible all the time. I don't even want the possibility of being accessible all the time.

Sometimes I think that applications like Twitter, that allow for constant connection, are responsible in part for creating a society where people can't connect with those who are right in front of them. That they are so busy telling people what they are doing that they forget to just live in the moment and enjoy what they are doing.

So maybe I'll just go out for a walk instead of Twittering. I hope that maybe the colour of the sky, or the buds on the trees, or the people I meet, will tell me something that Twitter won't be able to tell me.