Ephemeral Twittering And Being In The Moment

There was once a time when my web skills and knowledge might have been considered vaguely cutting edge. That time was probably the late 1990s and these days the ability to wield a “target=_blank” attribute with confidence cuts little ice. Consequently, I’ve been doing a big catch-up exercise on collaborative, Web 2.0 stuff over the past couple of months.
I’d become something of a Grumpy Old Man where shiny new web toys have been concerned. The reasons have been largely work-related. I felt obliged to focus my technical skills-building on the network stuff that made me a living, rather than the web stuff that was an outlet for my creativity. Also, a few months of CSS hell in mid-2002 put me off for a long while.
A lamentable state of mind and one that is thankfully a thing of the past. I’ve had a Flickr account for a while, but as you’ll see if you scroll to the bottom of the Hydragenic home page, recently I’ve been enthusiastically acquainting myself with all sorts of similar services, including Bloglines, Last.fm, YouTube and, most visibly vis a vis recent redesigning, Del.icio.us.
The latest thing I’ve signed up for is Twitter. I would have absolutely hated this a few months ago. I would have seen it as transient and ephemeral, the antithesis of creative writing and of Deeply Meaningful Connections Between People Via The Medium Of The Web. I would have issued dark mutterings about people having nowt better to do.
Thankfully I am no longer a twat and I am happy to report that Twitter is brilliant. What I love about it is primarily its haiku-like brevity. You have 156 characters in which to convey the truth of your life at any moment in time. Overt profundity is not the aim. Meaning and purpose are innate and implied, rather than explicitly articulated.
It ties in very well with the practice of meditation, in which the aim is to be in the moment, to concentrate consciously on what we are doing here and now, to be aware of what we are thinking and how we are feeling. (A small digression: if this sounds not unlike a description of cognitive behavioural therapy, the similarities had not escaped me.)
Three or four times a day I now find myself asking The Twitter Question: “What are you doing?” It encourages me to take a mental step back from my current activity and to consider precisely what my objective is and how it might add to my life. Then I spend thirty seconds or so Twittering it, after which it’s gone. It’s the blog equivalent of power-napping.
Twitter’s really cool thing is that it’s not just a web application, it also works via mobile phone text message (for both sending and receiving). Personally, I’m using it like a mini-blog, but I’ve seen others using it more like a group text. It’s certainly something that I’m much more likely to keep updated if it can be done by phone as well as computer.
I have no idea how long I’ll keep this up for and quite honestly I’m not really bothered. It’s a bit of fun, mainly. When it ceases to be so, then I won’t do it any more. In the meantime, if you already have a Twitter account and you’re not on my friends list, add me to yours and let’s see what happens. If you’re not currently a user, do you fancy having a go too?