So, awhile back, I quit Facebook, on which I had been wasting lots of time, and joined Twitter, on which I have been wasting barely any time. I don’t really get Twitter – probably mostly because if there’s anything I’m not, it’s concise. But last night, I finally participated in one of the trending topics, Less Interesting Books, and so here are my contributions, formatted as though they were a McSweeney’s List:
Titles of Less Interesting Books
1. Sense and Stability
2. Elizabeth Urello’s Diary
3. Infinite Pun
4. A Visit From the Pep Squad
5. To the Outhouse
6. The Daily Routine of Kavalier & Clay
7. Eat Pray Sleep
8. The Phantom of the Office
9. The Sound and the Comprehension of That Sound
10. The Long Well-Adjusted Life of Oscar Wao
11. Let Me Go Immediately
12. Calvin & Susie
13. Tender Is the Chicken
14. The Mortgaging of Hill House
15. The Bearable Lightness of Being With Jesus
What do you guys think of Twitter? Are you long-form or short-form interneters?
Accismus 
I am a fan of Twitter, as you know, but am biased because I have family members that work there. I’m slightly embarrassed (but obviously not TOO embarrassed) to say that I use it to curate my news and pop culture info. Now that I have gone passed the no-tv stage of hipsterdom and into the “I don’t even sit in front of a computer for any length of time every day” stage, I need information from the outside world to come at me through my phone in between checking on food orders at Nita. Which means checking the tweeted headlines from Feministing and the Daily Beast and seeing what kind of one liners Kurt Braunholer has cooked up for my amusement. It is phantasmagorical for one-liners, and that’s all I really have time for at the moment.
I like longform writing, but prefer to save it for once-a-week, Saturday morning coffee time. Which, you know, I get form the newspaper.
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I think the smart phone is a big part of it. I don’t have a smart phone, and as long as I’m at the computer anyway, I just find skimming headlines to be much more linear and manageable in an RSS reader than on Twitter. But on a phone, it would probably be hard to see the reader. A smart phone must be a Godsend for servers – when I was waiting tables, I had nothing whatsoever to do in the downtime, other than compulsively eat the complimentary bread.
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Not a Twitter fan–I think you have to be constantly corrected to make any sense of it and I’m regularly off line and out of cell phone range. It all means I’m very productive!
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Unfortunately, I live at my computer, and though I make rule after rule limiting my time on certain sites, I frequently find I’ve just spent four hours reading blogs. Although, this: http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/5683265883/dont-feel-guilty-if-you-spend-the-first-90
makes me feel better about it (even though I am not a young journalist). Because it’s not like I’m reading Top 10 Car Wrecks or anything – there’s a wealth of amazing writing on the web, which is why it’s so time-consuming.
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