Twitter – A Solitude Wail?

On: October 12, 2008
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About Cornelia Scripca
Currently a New Media Master student at Universiteit van Amsterdam. Graduated Film Faculty at the National University of Theater and Film in Bucharest, department of Audiovisual Communication.

Website
http://expandedmindtricks.blogspot.com    

I follow you means I’m watching you and what you are pretending to be doing every second. Is that true? Or is it that I want everyone to watch me? In other words is Twitter a medium for creating and maintaining relationships – making social contacts through the Internet – or is it a way of showing off individualism?
I have thought of the number of people that are really interested in what I’m doing at a certain minute and I realized that no matter what I write I don’t get any response. People are NOT interested in what I’m writing! This means that the 20 ‘friends’ that I have on Twitter are not really my friends. In this case, should I consider Twitter as a way to communicate? Communication, of course, is not necessarily a discussion between two or more people, is more than that. The science of communication explains that a person can communicate with its own ‘ego’. If this is the case, why would I want to communicate with me on Twitter?
Probably the younger generations see in Twitter a way of showing off to the world and to their friends how great they are. They’re using it because it’s ‘cool’, because it’s ‘trendy’. In a way, they feel they are in touch with the world every second. But underneath their actions I discovered a deep human necessity. People have always felt the need to be appreciated by others, to be the center of attention, to be surrounded by friends.
Sometimes solitude brings us to despair. When we feel lonely and desperate, we appeal to any medium to demonstrate to ourselves that we’re still worth it, that we still have something to say. Since we are teared apart by the speed of information, by the lack of time, we tend to feel more and more lonely. Twitter is just a big ‘scream’, a sign.
As the character Christopher from the movie Into the wild discovers at the end of his life, “happiness is real only when shared”.

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