Focus Features

I am twittering. Tweeting. Okay, I’m not really sure what the verb for sending out 140-character posts on the Twitter service is, but that’s because I’m still pretty new to the thing. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I figured out that “RT” stands for “re-tweet” and not “real time,” and that wasn’t long after I discovered that the @ sign was used to both direct a tweet to another user as well as simply alert your other readers that the person you are referring to is a Twitterer too.

With more than eight million Twitter users, I don’t presume that my joining is of any great significance. But the reason I thought I’d write a few words about it is that for most of Twitter’s lifespan I was one of those people Karina Longworth cites in her article here who asked, “Why bother?”

In fact, I went further than the nonchalant dismissal suggested by that two-word brush-off. To friends on Twitter I directed actual scorn, openly putting down what I imagined was their compulsion to broadcast every incidental moment of their lives to similarly loose-lipped friends. And, when it came to their truly significant moments, I hated the inflection of irony that the 140-word compression inevitably produced. I remember reading a piece in the New York Times a year or so ago that argued for Twitter, saying that the service gives you a “psychic map” of all of your friends’ activities so that when you see them in person your interaction is enriched by all of this shared knowledge.  The thought of looking for my keys in the morning while my brain is full of the minutiae of my friends’ lives struck me as deeply unappealing.

But I decided to join Twitter so I’d at least be informed about the service I was bashing, signing up as part of the recent wave of not-so-early adopters, the patron saint of whom is indisputably the New York Times’ David Pogue. In the space of three columns in January and February of this year Pogue went from dubious (“I’ll admit that, for the longest, time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype”) to being a little bit complimentary (calling it “sweet, funny, interesting” and “entertaining”) to being, just a month later, a convert: “There’s nothing quite like Twitter… don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” (And now, two months later, he’s tweeting jokes: “A cement truck has collided with a prison van. Police are in pursuit of several hardened criminals.”) 

Like a number of editors, writers and columnists, I decided to set up an account that I’d use to connect with the readers of Filmmaker magazine, which I edit. () I’m also sending out some tweets on FilmInFocus’s new Twitter site. Initially I imagined that I’d just be linking back to my blog posts, but early on I was warned that this is considered bad form. (Nonetheless, all the big sites, like Drudge and HuffPo, seem to do it.)  So, I started posting a few links, mostly to other sites, and some retweets (i.e., reposting others’ interesting posts). Then I started throwing out few questions, like what kind of podcast mic to get or what’s the best sub-$1,000 camcorder, and soon these questions blurred into non-film related things like recommendations of Manhattan pork sandwiches and discussions of novels. Some of my questions have been forwarded to interesting people, and as a result I’ve met some writers I’ve long admired. In terms of what I read, I set up a list of followers heavily favoring news organizations, commentators and bloggers as well as my close friends, making my Twitter feed somewhere between a chat room and an RSS feed. If people’s posts are boring, I un-follow them. And that latter point is part of what’s great about Twitter: it opts out of the intrusive “friend” paradigm of Facebook. In fact, it’s not really a social networking site – it’s more like a form of personal broadcasting because while anybody can receive your tweets (unless you make them private), you only receive the people you choose to tune into. For anyone who begrudgingly clicks “accept friend” from a barely-remembered high school acquaintance and then finds his or her Facebook homepage full of annoying oversharing, this is fantastic.

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I am twittering. Tweeting. Okay, I’m not really sure what the verb for sending out 140-character posts on the Twitter service is, but that’s because I’m still pretty new to the thing. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I figured out that “RT” stands for “re-tweet” and not “real time,” and that wasn’t long after I discovered that the @ sign was used to both direct a tweet to another user as well as simply alert your other readers that the person you are referring to is a Twitterer too.

With more than eight million Twitter users, I don’t presume that my joining is of any great significance. But the reason I thought I’d write a few words about it is that for most of Twitter’s lifespan I was one of those people Karina Longworth cites in her article here who asked, “Why bother?”

In fact, I went further than the nonchalant dismissal suggested by that two-word brush-off. To friends on Twitter I directed actual scorn, openly putting down what I imagined was their compulsion to broadcast every incidental moment of their lives to similarly loose-lipped friends. And, when it came to their truly significant moments, I hated the inflection of irony that the 140-word compression inevitably produced. I remember reading a piece in the New York Times a year or so ago that argued for Twitter, saying that the service gives you a “psychic map” of all of your friends’ activities so that when you see them in person your interaction is enriched by all of this shared knowledge.  The thought of looking for my keys in the morning while my brain is full of the minutiae of my friends’ lives struck me as deeply unappealing.

But I decided to join Twitter so I’d at least be informed about the service I was bashing, signing up as part of the recent wave of not-so-early adopters, the patron saint of whom is indisputably the New York Times’ David Pogue. In the space of three columns in January and February of this year Pogue went from dubious (“I’ll admit that, for the longest, time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype”) to being a little bit complimentary (calling it “sweet, funny, interesting” and “entertaining”) to being, just a month later, a convert: “There’s nothing quite like Twitter… don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” (And now, two months later, he’s tweeting jokes: “A cement truck has collided with a prison van. Police are in pursuit of several hardened criminals.”) 

Like a number of editors, writers and columnists, I decided to set up an account that I’d use to connect with the readers of Filmmaker magazine, which I edit. () I’m also sending out some tweets on FilmInFocus’s new Twitter site. Initially I imagined that I’d just be linking back to my blog posts, but early on I was warned that this is considered bad form. (Nonetheless, all the big sites, like Drudge and HuffPo, seem to do it.)  So, I started posting a few links, mostly to other sites, and some retweets (i.e., reposting others’ interesting posts). Then I started throwing out few questions, like what kind of podcast mic to get or what’s the best sub-$1,000 camcorder, and soon these questions blurred into non-film related things like recommendations of Manhattan pork sandwiches and discussions of novels. Some of my questions have been forwarded to interesting people, and as a result I’ve met some writers I’ve long admired. In terms of what I read, I set up a list of followers heavily favoring news organizations, commentators and bloggers as well as my close friends, making my Twitter feed somewhere between a chat room and an RSS feed. If people’s posts are boring, I un-follow them. And that latter point is part of what’s great about Twitter: it opts out of the intrusive “friend” paradigm of Facebook. In fact, it’s not really a social networking site – it’s more like a form of personal broadcasting because while anybody can receive your tweets (unless you make them private), you only receive the people you choose to tune into. For anyone who begrudgingly clicks “accept friend” from a barely-remembered high school acquaintance and then finds his or her Facebook homepage full of annoying oversharing, this is fantastic.

But if you do want to be the recipient of all your friends’ oversharing, you can do that too. That’s what’s great about Twitter. It can be a real-time communication device (at the South by Southwest Film Festival this year, questions from the audience were taken over Twitter) or a stream of stock tips or a font of Britney Spears fan news (some of it from the singer herself) or a simple “top ten headlines” feed.

Of course, Facebook was great too until its recent horrible redesign and the anxiety caused by the inevitability of its “monetization,” whatever that may be. Perhaps Twitter will soon be overrun too with un-needed improvements and we’ll all move on to something else. Until then, enjoy its casual simplicity, which defines itself, as Pogue titled his final article, like this: “Twitter? It’s What You Make It.”

FilmInFocus’s Top Ten Twitter Picks

If you are new to Twitter, here are ten can’t miss people to follow. To find any of them, simply append their name here to the URL twitter.com/

Sashafrerejones: The New Yorker’s pop music writer, whose tweets are alternately witty, informative and puzzling.

Guykawasaki: Venture capitalist and writer Guy Kawasaki must be on Twitter 24/7 (or have a great team of interns) to crank out his constant links to cutting-edge new media business news.

Neilhimself: Coraline creator Neil Gaiman is a Twitter superstar, with almost 200,000 followers.  Blog links, quotes, his daily news, comments to his fans – he does it all.

Diablocody: In her tweets, Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody maintains a witty outsider-looking-in take on the entertainment business.

ThatKevinSmith: If you’re going to overshare, at least make it funny. Smith does.

Clairemc: From shopping trips to the mall with her daughters to explaining her latest Senate vote, frequent Twitterer Claire McCaskill has figured out how to pack maximum information into her 140 characters.

KarinaLongworth: The life of an online film critic — Spout’s Karina Longworth lets you in on her critical process and also tells you where you can find her for dinner.

David_Lynch: Aphoristic thoughts on filmmaking and transcendental meditation by the director of Mulholland Drive.

Oblique_Chirps: A Twitter feed comprised of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a system of creativity-inducing directives intended for musicians but usable by just about anybody.

Pogue: And, yes, of course, the New York Times’s David Pogue. Tech advice for casual consumers, gear heads and also, yes, jokes… lots of jokes.