Twitter Stories We Tell, Things We'd Relive

My article from an old Media & Tech blog (September 1st 2011)

(image credit)

As part of recently launching the first two of my business projects, Smart Media Technologies [exited] and this Media&Tech blog [closed], I have finally gotten myself active on Twitter.

For the longest time, I thought Twitter was odd. The 140-character limit amounted to mere snippets of thought, information, and triviality. I tried to use it in some similar vein as I did Facebook, but that effort obviously didn’t go anywhere. The two sites are radically different phenomena. As smarty pants as I was, I just couldn’t figure out Twitter and why it was so darn popular.

Well, I’m happy to say that I’m slowly figuring it out. I’m approaching 500 followers, following over 1000, and my tweets nearly doubling at 200 since three weeks ago.

One thing I learned about recently is Trends and how to participate in it. I needed to put the Trend label, #10thingsidrelive, somewhere in my tweet. I spent some time reading what others had tweeted, and reflected on them. And I finally understood what it meant for others to say that Twitter was micro-blogging.

Blogging is a kind of personal diary. But my traditional notion of such was having no restraint on what I wrote and how short or long I wrote it. Twitter was a different animal altogether. What I realized was this. Taken together these tweets were a collective personal diary. More about crowd-blogging, really.

Here are what some people tweeted on 10 things they’d relive:

“watching and reading all the Harry Potter’s for the first time”

I can only imagine this young lady’s thrill at participating in this JK Rowling masterpiece, which captured the imagination of people the world over.

“my childhood”

Sometimes it seems we hear only stories of dread about childhood. Well, this young man apparently had quite an opposite experience.

“My teenage years. I’d probably do things a lil’ different”

Judging from her profile photo, this lady doesn’t look too far removed from her teenage years. But there’s concession, humor, and perhaps wisdom in her pithy message.

“the first years of my relationship” and “losing my virginity” and “the kiss”

Oh, bittersweet, no. I have no idea, of course, what their relationships were like beyond those points that they wanted to relive. But reminiscence for a time past can bring just the right touch of color to the canvas, when we paint our lives.

“a family vacation when my parents were still together”

I found myself hoping that perhaps her parents got back together, for her sake. I don’t know. Bittersweet.

“the MANY trips i’ve taken away from this galaxy”

Well, as a kid, that would’ve been a super-awesome family vacation!

“the future”

I love it! Physicists talk about ‘wormholes’ through which space can be compressed and time not just altered but also fluid. You can go forward and backward in time, apparently, so you can live, and therefore relive, the future. I want to know where that train station is!

Me, what did I tweet? Well, I wanted to be clever, but honestly I couldn’t think of any such thing after reading several tweets on this Trend. So I just wrote what was on my mind:

So this is our story.  The story of our lives.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD