French journalist in DC hates Twitter’s guts

Image by RealEstateZebra via Flickr

Can you help me with a #moderncrisis and #personaldilemma: I hate Twitter so much. I had high hopes that Google Wave or some much better other thing would sweep it away, but it hasn’t happened yet. I found Twitter somewhat useful to check some tweets during the snow storms in DC (firefighters: look both ways when crossing street!) but most of the time, I just wish my favorite tweetsters could stop using this dreadful twitter novlangue and go back to blogging in full sentences already.

Of course, I have a Twitter too: I joined in 2007 but only started tweeting last year, for no particular reason, just to stay in the loop. Even you relented! Should I stop worrying and learn to love Twitter or do you see in the current twittermania the seeds of some awesome and smart new medium that could make me all excited and giddy like it’s 1999 again? — Grumpy in DC.

Dear Grumpy,

Nothing will make you excited and giddy like it’s 1999 again. That was 11 years ago! The Internet was pretty worn out already, even then, and the dot-com bust of March 2000 made it clear that the Web was just a lot of lies and dog puppets made of other people’s fake money. What were people even doing on the Internet in 1999? Selling the beanie babies on eBay?

And then, magically, some new stuff happened. Stuff we all take for granted now: blogging, YouTube, Facebook, sexting, LOLcats, ChatRoulette. And all of that stuff was pretty lame, too.

Twitter’s not really a whole lot worse than that other junk. The people who use it are worse, sure, because studies show more than 90% of Twitterers are gross old Republican senators. They don’t even know about the “140 character limit” on Twitter, that’s just how they think and write all the time — like idiots.

As for you and your friends, there’s no reason to stop writing in complete sentences or spelling words correctly just because you’re using one “status message” service or another. Wy wod u hav 2 do dat & lok vv dum? Just write a sentence that fits the space. Journalists and editors have been doing it since the dawn of the Printing Press, whenever they needed to make a headline fit the available space on the page.

Is it hard to write full sentences in 140 characters? Not at all. Americans already type too much garbage on the Internet. To be clear and concise is no crime. In fact, brevity in writing is often evidence of clarity in thought. I use Twitter for work, to announce things I’ve written and posts on Wonkette, and there may well be other benign uses for the thing. And every sentence in this paragraph was well below 140 characters.

Don’t let some old dingbat in Congress or halfwit celebrity decide how you will or won’t use Twitter. Just say no to creepy sext-ing politicians and illiterate Hollywood actors. Twitter doesn’t kill language, people do.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet, and he is just a writer who works for Wonkette.