I have a confession to make. I tweeted the other night. Yes, I officially joined the tweeterati and I’m having trouble dealing with it.
I swore I’d never do it. It may, in fact, have been the low point of my career — and what really scares me is that I might someday do it again.
I tweeted from the Pepsi Center, where I was covering the Nuggets game via Twitter. Many of my friends (I know they’re friends because they have friended me on Facebook) accused me of tweeting simply in order to get a free ticket to the game.
I’ll admit that these accusations hurt. They were aimed directly at my sense of journalistic integrity and self-worth. If I had wanted a free ticket, I told people, I could have gone to the game and just written this column (hmm).
But an editor suggested that I go to the game and Twitter, and I did it. I can’t really explain it, except that it seemed something like a dare. Of course, if I had been really daring, I would have gone the whole way — and not just tweeted but texted while driving.
Texting while driving, of course, puts other people’s lives at risk so that you can, say, text your friends that you saw this really funny-looking dude on the sidewalk who looked just like the Birdman — and almost hit him while you were texting about this really funny-looking dude who looked just like the Birdman.
Fortunately, your legislators — apparently pro-Birdman legislators — saw fit to make texting while driving illegal, although talking on your cellphone while driving to tell your friends about the funny-looking dude you almost hit remains perfectly legal under Colorado law. And, so as far as I know, is tweeting.
The issue of whether to tweet or not to tweet is, I’m told, nothing more or less than the issue of whether I’m prepared to move in the direction of the 21st century. And yet, I was perfectly content being a dinosaur. I certainly had no desire to become part of the greater social network.
OK, I had joined Facebook because I needed to do it for a story, and now I have dozens of Facebook friends and many more people I don’t know who want to be my Facebook friends. And now, it has gotten to the point that a friend, right on my Facebook page, explains that, “For some reason, just realized I have never played hopscotch, even once.”
What I’m saying is, sure, I believe in evolution, but not necessarily as a self-help project.
I had first learned about Twitter at the Rocky Mountain News just before it folded. Twittering was supposed to help save the paper and possibly journalism, not to mention my phony-baloney job.
If you’re wondering how that was supposed to have helped, I was wondering the same thing. What you have to know — and what editors often miss — is that by the time the mainstream media latch on to any new technology, it’s already old technology.
Newspapers are not hip. Or sick. OK, I guess we actually are sick, but you know what I mean.
By the way, Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post wrote a great column the other day on a related topic. Someone had written that the problem with newspapers was that we’re turning off the kids by using outdated references to, like, JFK or vinyl record albums. So he decided to footnote all such references.
For “row to hoe,” he explained it was “an agrarian reference to a very difficult task . . . Think of it as trying to reconfigure the hard drive on your MacBook without sufficient random access memory.”
Twitter — for you middle-agers — is a free service, that “lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you doing?’ ”
Newspapers, on the other hand, have turned into an all-too-free service (on the Web anyway) that is supposed to ask and answer the question, “What the hell were these guys thinking?”
Twittering, as I’m sure you know, demands writing in 140-character chunks of pithiness. Why 140 characters, I don’t know. I assume it has something to do with the technology, or maybe it’s just a tribute to the Bard’s concept that brevity is the soul of wit. (Of course, I think it was Mark Twain, an old newspaperman, who once apologized for a writing a long letter. He said he didn’t have time to write short.)
Column writing, on the other hand, comes in 850-word chunks of random pithiness that might examine, say, the issue of why President Barack Obama decided not to release the torture photos. Or, if we’re into a really important topic, why you shouldn’t even bother trying to get Nuggets playoff tickets.
If you’re tweeting, you can just write “Obama nixes torture pix and ACLU says he’s the new Dick Cheney.”
Or: “Can’t find Nugs tix for love or money, unless we’re talking Powerball money.”
Of course, sometimes, I guess, that’s really all you need to say.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He tweets, so far, only on the odd Tuesday (and you can only read his tweets if you become a “follower”). You can still reach him the old way at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
