The Spread of Culture Disease

Recently, against every muscle in my body that's spends anytime during the day avoiding cultural trends, and against every chemical change in my cortex responsible for common sense, I signed up for a Twitter account, and I love it. The best way I can describe it is, "It's one of those things you didn't realize you wanted, until you have it." Controversy surrounds it, and it has a growing number of critics, from the scholarly world, to pop culture icons, all of whom ask things like, "What's the point, who cares?" Everyone is Tweeting, yet who really cares, who's paying attention? But that's not the point. The point is, Twitter is growing fast whether or not there's someone there to care or not. Everyone is getting on Twitter. It was easy to say it was worthless and who's going to care what I have to say in 160 characters or less, but once you have one, you start to use it, and you start to use it more often than you ever thought. You're Tweeting random thoughts, things you overheard, your mood, things you ate for dinner. It's a world of instantaneous gratification, and it's too much information. Still, users don't seem to care, which comes back to the point, what's the point of Twitter? Obviously, it a networking tool, but more specifically it's a communication tool. Facebook, a networking site, has become a more indepth Twitter. Facebook, which is signing up 100,000 new users daily, tells all the inner workings of your friends, their private goals and dreams, random "secretive" facts they've never told anyone before. To me, this is overkill, this is mass information and the spread of culture disease. To follow someone on Twitter, I don't need to know their favorite book, or who they like to spend their mornings with, I just get the present facts. It's static information that overflows, but soon starts to build characters out of people. It's not our wall post, or funny UTube clips we send each other that makes us humans, it's our day to day lives, the little struggles we send out to each other, the little triumphs we share with our own corner of the world. Facebook has become bloated and unworkable, almost inhuman. Twitter is pleasurable to a minimalist like me and it's a conversation starter. So who cares if I Twitter? Nobody, but that's not the point. It's free and takes about twenty seconds, so where is there loss? Where is the human depravity and collapse of society that's supposed to come with this? It's instant access to our world, and not nearly the evil it's claimed to be. Critics can ask "Who cares?" all they want, but the truth is still people are signing up and it's not stopping. Apparently it doesn't matter if anybody cares, because that's not who its for.