Twittering, but not with enthusiasm

I signed up for Twitter today but I'm not sure why, or whether I'll keep it up. Thanks to the act of signing up, I think I've discovered the outer limits of my attention span and it's certainly longer than 16o characters. Yup, it was interesting,at least for a bit, to know what Stephen Fry was doing during this particular collection of moments, but it's all a bit twitchy for me.

It's almost as though Twitter depends on a strange kind of material skepticism. The ontology suggested by Twitter is that my friends cease to exist when I don't see them, or at least read their tweets. Twitter may fill in the gaps between our meetings, but do I really want that? I'm comfortable with the notion that other folks have an existence beyond my own entertainment - I don't need to constantly check up on them. And if they need to check on me, then I'm happy for them to assume my non-existence between phone calls, texts, emails, lunches, drinks, the occasional breakfast, parties, meetings and glances across a room.

I'm not here. If I'm not blogging, flickring or twittering, you can assume I have been reduced to a Euclidean point.

Meanwhile, at the next computer, Alex is listening to interleaved songs by Smashing Pumpkins and Skyhooks. Alphabetical order may be in play, but I'm impressed that to Al, it's just all good music from the past. What to me is a long twenty years is collapsed into "the past" for him.