I Am DB

And who am I to disagree?

I’m just one little man, no longer able to fend off the crushing weight of that cultural force known as Twitter. Goddamn, I hate when I have to give in to something I’ve tried so hard to resist. But give in I must. And I feel like a sell-out.

I actually created a Twitter account several months ago. As my job hunt continues, and as I keep looking at postings for writing and communications positions, one thing that pops up over and over again is that employers want workers who are familiar with/comfortable with/adept with/experienced with social media. Sometimes they leave it at that, and sometimes they specifically mention Facebook and Twitter. Never mind that half these places have absolutely no need for Twitter feeds or Facebook pages. But hey, all the cool kids are playing with these tools, so every shithead wants in on the action, whether or not there’s any action to be had. So okay, fine, if I want to get these jobs, I need to be good with the social media, and that means sucking it up and climbing aboard the Twitter train. I created an account. I signed up to follow Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, Eddie Izzard, Simon Pegg, Kevin Smith, Steve Martin…a few other people. Then I pretty much never logged in.

Twitter has always seemed like a stupid idea to me. As if texting wasn’t doing enough damage to both human interaction and the human ability to spell, now we had a whole platform built around the idea of delivering 140-character blips? Overlooking the character limit for a moment, my first thought was, “Why tweet when you could text?” I’m still not sure I know the answer to that. I think it might have something to do with hashtags and building or contributing to a community of commenters around a certain topic…but I’m not yet sure if I fully “get” hashtags, so I have no idea if I’m on the right track. I hear the word “hashtag” and I get a craving for some pan-fried potato shreddings. Or I think of John Travolta extolling the virtues of Amsterdam to Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

They should call ’em hash bars instead of hashtags. I’d dig that the most.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah…Twitter is stupid. I did eventually see one outlet for it that I approved of, and that was comedy. Twitter has been good for comedy.  Maybe I’m not remembering accurately, but I feel like Conan jumped on it pretty quickly and started having fun with it early on. And many other comic personalities have made good use of it. As my above list of followees indicates, I initially utilized it as a delivery system for their witty observations. Beyond that…meh.

There are some political protesters in the Middle East who might disagree with me, as Twitter and other social media tools are credited with playing a significant role in the Arab Spring uprisings. And if these platforms indeed helped in their movement, then praise be to Allah, Mark Zuckerberg and whoever founded Twitter. I don’t deny that people have found ways to make good use of it. Last year, a friend in L.A. was able to score tickets to an anniversary screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark (followed by a Q&A with Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford!) by responding to a Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter’s Twitter feed. So hey, that’s value. I’m still just not sure how Twitter enables things that texting doesn’t. Please feel free to educate me in the comments.

Hopefully I’ll find out soon enough one way or another, because the whole point of this already-overlong post is to announce – with all the lack of fanfare merited – that I’m now on Twitter. As in, I’m actually going to start tweeting. Not just because a working knowledge of the tool could be an asset in my job search, but because admittedly, it could be a nice complement to the blog and perhaps gain me additional readers. If I have something to say that doesn’t justify an entire post, I can tweet it. If I want to follow-up on something mentioned in an earlier post, I can tweet it. If I want to send a creepy, stalker-ish message to Natalie Portman, I can tweet it. And maybe this will finally be the way to highlight the constant flow of brilliant segments from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report that I haven’t been posting on the blog itself.

I don’t expect I’ll be doing it too often, and I’m not about to implore people to follow my Twitter feed the way I pathetically begged for blog subscribers. But if you want to follow me, I’ll be there. Strangely, at the time of this writing I already have eleven followers. Which makes no sense to me since I’ve yet to send a single tweet, meaning these eleven people (one of whom, it should be said, I’ve never heard of) presumably looked me up to see if I had an account and then just signed up. Anyway…the username DB was already taken…as were most reasonable variations I could think of, and even some pretty unreasonable variations. So despite the risk of misrepresenting myself as having an advanced degree, I went with #DoctorDB.

By the time you read this post, I will likely have sent my first tweet. And I will likely feel a little dirty about it. I’ll be in the shower.