Twitter, Twitter, Tweet

At the time of this report I have 759 followers on Twitter and I am following 10 twits myself. For those of you as out of it as I was ten or twelve days ago: Twitter is like an old fashioned chat room except everyone gets to decide who’s in the room. You take the comments of only those you want to read and you can block people who creep you out from reading yours. Beyond that, it’s a chat room where you can say pretty much whatever you want as many times as you want about anything you want 140 characters at a time. As wide open as it is, nobody on it can seem to come up with much to talk about except what’s going on with them. I do it myself.

Two days ago I tweeted, “A beautiful spring morning in Vermont. 19 degrees and sunny. Our sap buckets runneth over.” All true. Pastoral. Vaguely literary. A good tweet, by twitter standards, I think. Yesterday I mentioned my dental cleaning appointment.

The ten people I follow so far are mostly friends – some famous, some not – and relatives. No one famous. My son out west tweets about going to work and eating breakfast. This warms my heart a little. When other people tweet about their breakfasts it is not as heartwarming. Weekend Edition host, Scott Simon, who I follow, vowed he would never tweet about his breakfast, but then last week he did. Nice job of it, though. That’s the basic problem with Twitter. You find yourself digitizing passing thoughts that would otherwise…pass. The cursor blinking in that little box is just begging you to do it. It used to only be 24 hour news channels having to feed the beast with whatever information they could dredge up. Now we all have a crawl at the bottom of our screens. On the train to Pittsburgh -- Check my blog on Michael Steele -- My cat eats Fruit Loops --

Twenty-five years ago I staggered into a not half-bad career by contributing commentary on NPR's afternoon news program All Things Considered. I mostly talked about the same stuff people are Twittering about these days: What the dog had been up to. Things I found in my junk drawer, and yes, breakfast. Over a period of a few years of it I became obsessively self aware and no small detail or event in my life went unexamined as material. I got so sick of it I had to turn to writing fiction, which was probably not the best career move but it settled my stomach.

The great essayist E.B. White addressed this problem in the forward to a collection of his essays, which I once quoted in full in the forward to a collection of mine. In it he says in part, The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

He concludes with this admission, I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.

759 followers and following 10. E.B. White would understand, but I’m getting a weird feeling in my stomach again. Something I ate for breakfast? Probably worth a tweet.

As heard on The Bob Edwards Show on XM/Sirius Radio May 4, 2009