meish dot org: life, unfolding

Dear Twitter Friend,

There’s no easy way to say this, no sugar coating that can make this pill easier to swallow: It’s over. I’m breaking up with you.

When we got together, it was fun. The medium was young and we were playful; trading confidences and sharing snapshots of experience with our social groups via the constraint of 140 characters.

Offline, we met for drinks and events and our conversations spilled over into IM, email: You had my phone number, like I had yours, but we used Twitter to send D messages instead of texts – so much easier to type than thumb-fumble.

We lived in the fragile familiarity of the overlapping Venn of our friends. Life was good.

And then things changed. The site became popular. You grew with it, started to gather contacts and acquaintances until they began to multiply of their own accord, like copper coins by the end of a day. Soon, your Twitter contacts list was made up of more followers than friends – people with whom you had a string of casual textual encounters.

The intimacies we’d once shared, ambient and otherwise, were gone. I was still private, protected, placing trust in those I’d selected to belong to my community, but you had opened up, and it had all become a game. You had no time for mere status updates now, when you could be interfacing with the world; broadcasting, gaily @ting in public with the masses (where a quick D would have done just as well), flaunting public displays of affectation.

But still I clung to the relationship. I wanted to believe that the connection we had was personal, special; that you valued what I had to say as much as what you put out there; that like me, you were listening and speaking from the perspective that ours was a shared social space, that what we said needed to be relevant or at least interesting to everyone else forced to listen.

I was wrong.

You began to use our relationship as a way to bombard me with stuff. You carried on conversations with others in front of me (and everyone else).

You used our personal connection instead of a blog; instead of a search engine; instead of an IM client; instead of a loudhailer; instead of an RSS feed.

You mistook my lack of constant interaction for receptive listening and overshared the minutae of your day; that conference; the gig you were at. The platform became more important to you than the people on it. It became important to you that #everything #you #said #was #findable.

You blurred personal with public, and friendship with frequency. You used tools to interface with The Community (and me, somewhere in it) which aped IM clients or blogging extensions.

Or if you weren’t spreading it on thickly, you were silent: watching, listening, taking more than you gave, letting my candid confessions of everyday existence hang pregnantly in the ether between us without sharing your own experience of life, or what it is like in words. Silence sounds a lot like judgement: feels unbalanced when we’re down at the pub and is no more comfortable online.

The discomfort of the relationship became the elephant in the room; the moose on the table; the failwhale in the jamjar. When I found myself gritting teeth when you flooded a page (especialy when there was no “older” link) or @ted at people instead of IM, I knew it was time to do something bold.

So I searched for a pause button. I hunted for ways to stem the torrent of trivia, the bombardment of your broadcast persona loud in my browser. I wanted to find a way to keep the closeness we’d once had while also making you realise that I valued our relationship but I couldn’t carry on like this.

But there’s no pause button. And so I’m breaking it off. If you don’t see me in your contact list anymore, this is why: I’m a friend, not one of your followers.

I’m sorry – I wish there was another way – but it’s clear that our connection means something different to me than to you. There have been too many small irritations or lapses of what passes for reasonable social behaviour for this to be ignored.

It’s time to call it a day.

I still value your friendship – you must remember that – and we’ll still have pints in the pub, emails, and the occasional IM. There are loads of ways we can communicate comfortably again – I’ll still be reading your blog, looking out for you on my buddy list, subscribed to your RSS. I’ll look forward to you tumbling into my browser, full of the youness of your life and passions. Maybe you’ll be reading my online stuff, too. I hope we can hold onto something of what once brought us together.

Maybe at some point in the future, your Twitter stream will split and you’ll have different streams and modes of communication for different kinds of people depending on relevance and relationship. Maybe, one day, I hope.

But until then, until we can share the same social space without it feeling like a burden or an infringement or a chore, it’s time to make the break. It’s for our own good.

Until that day, I remain, forever, your friend,

Meg
x

(PS I’m not breaking up with Twitter, the app. I’ll still use it, and still see other people on it. I’m just pruning my community, is all; This isn’t about Twitter. This is about you and how you use it.)