Twittering Away

With the invention of the internet a whole new variety of "verbs" arose. In fact, this age of technology seems to have given all humans a "right" to turn many nouns into verbs. For example, "Just google it," has become an acceptable way of telling someone to search for an answer to his questions, as opposed to saying, "Go and look up the answer to your inquiry on the search engine called Google.com." More recently, "I'll twitter it," has come to be universally understood that the speaker is saying that they will update their Twitter status to whatever their current actions may be. Perhaps this latter example (twittering) is the perfect example of how today's "tech savvy" generation is obsessed with its own thoughts, actions, and ideas.

Overall, twittering serves a twofold purpose: to inform the world (more specifically, those who follow you on twitter) of your own thoughts and actions and to stay informed on the thoughts and actions of those whose twitter feeds that you yourself follow. Simple enough, the concept of twittering is really nothing new; it's just an easier way to stalk people who are self absorbed with the importance of their own actions. However, if one exams the idea behind the basis for twittering, one can certainly learn a lot about how this generation thinks.

First of all, twittering shows how this generation seems consumed by the importance of its own actions. Activities that were common or mundane to past generations are seen as activities important enough to justify letting all of their "followers" know about their happening. Things such as going to the grocery store, doing homework, or walking the dog are seen as "twitter-worthy" activities by most twitter-ers. Interestingly enough, this faze of twittering all of one's regular, every day activities is not limited to the "common" people; celebrities have jumped on the twitter train and are updating their fans on their every movement. The assignment of such importance to formerly unpraised activities seems to reveal how important this twittering generation views their every action or thought.

Interestingly enough, while twittering all of these activities seems to reveal this obsession with one's importance, it also reveals how little value that this same generation assigns to their actions and thoughts. While previous generations saved all of their personal anecdotes for autobiographies to be written later in life, this generation has no real need for such literature; the information and stories has already been available to them for free through twitter. Similarly, no longer do people use the phrase, "A penny for your thoughts." Instead, today's generation has offered those thoughts for free on twitter.