I was thinking about Twitter this morning, my thoughts triggered by a news item I saw on the subject. It’s not something I think a great deal about. I am there (Alheithinn if you’re interested) but I don’t use it much. Sometimes to Tweet about a blog post, or I can use it to Tweet updates about MosMaiorum (I anticipate a few of those this winter), or I can use it to find news stories posted by my Digg brothers and sisters (I’ve done more of that this week as I deal with the H1N1 here), but one thing I don’t do is Tweet about me – about the minutiae of my life. I’ve always said, with regards to government spying, that anyone bored enough to want to spy on me is welcome to it, and I pity them. They’ll be bored silly. I really don’t care much about the minutiae of my own life, let alone the minutiae of other lives (I mean, I love y’all but c’mon!). I don’t need to know what so-and-so is doing from one minute to the next. I’m too busy doing something myself. And if you try to record your life in that sort of detail, are you really living your life at all? Or just “aping for the camera” so to speak?

This all leaves out another use for Twitter – our gods given right to say and do whatever we’re thinking about from minute to minute – and not in the privacy of our own homes (where we’re protected from ourselves) but right out there in front of the gods and everybody. Some post pictures they later regret. Some spew verbal diarrhea.

It also provides people with an opportunity to destroy their lives instantly. The old “stop and think before you open your mouth” thing seems to go missing on Twitter where people become accustomed to utter every random thought. Look at John McCain’s daughter and her impulsively snapped and posted image, or more seriously, Larry Johnson, running back for the Kansas City Chiefs, who not only lost his job with the Chiefs this week (being released) but was also fined by the NFL $213,000, the amount he would have earned for the game he’ll miss due to being suspended by the team. Apparently, Larry Johnson’s latent anti-gay attitudes surface when his fingers ran away from his brain and he said what he most likely had been thinking all along.

So here we are, able to sit back and watch lives implode all around us – and Tweet about them. It’s the new circle of life.

I can see where Twitter might have some useful applications. Some of those I mentioned above, for example. Or making plans and avoiding having to call a dozen people to discuss it. Of course, the downside is everybody being in your business but maybe that’s part of the thrill – I don’t know. I have yet to find a real application as far as religion goes but I probably haven’t given it enough thought. I just don’t think about Twitter all that much. I don’t understand the obsession people have with it. I’m not against social networking. I think it’s a great thing. I think it does make the world a smaller place, and people who can get to know each other across international borders are less likely to want to shoot at one another. Maybe someday, we’ll feel enough like a human family that a new sort of cosmotheism will be born, something that can transcend ethnic, religious, political, and cultural boundaries. I hope so. Things change. The Internet has changed since it started out. It will be interesting to see how Twitter changes and adapts and is adapted in the years to come.

Meanwhile, we’ll be amused or horrified by the occasional self-destructive episode of somebody who didn’t stop to think about what they were doing. At least on a blog, I have time to write a post (often on MS WORD), sleep on it, think about it, re-read it, sometimes not post it (I’ve had a few of those over the years). But Twitter is real time. Writing it yesterday makes it obsolete. You don’t sleep on it there. It’s “go,go,go!” all the time. That’s the whole point. Immediacy = relevance. Maybe I’m just too old for it. Time moves too fast and I want to take my time. Or maybe I’ve just found my comfort zone and I’m happy where I am.