Be Gentle

by T. Scott
August 16, 2010

Confession time.

Only a few short weeks ago, the ranks of nonTweeters included me. I didn’t just not Tweet, I dismissed Twitter as a silly waste of time and the planet’s resources.

Did I care what somebody in the Twitterverse was telling the world he/she was having for lunch, however tastily that morsel of news was reported in 140 characters or less? Did I want anything to do with celebrity gossip? Not in this lifetime.

Ah, ignorance. It’s such a great time- and brain-saver. Dismissing things you don’t know much about sure helps manage all of the clutter caused by real thought.

Besides, I had been talked into giving Dome a presence on Facebook a few months ago…and then committed the sin of not keeping it updated. Nothing worse in the social media world than being, well, anti-social. So the last thing Dome needed to do was add a Twitter life that quickly shriveled and died.

In a moment of weakness, however, I allowed myself to find out something about Twitter. Taken to Twitter.com (without gunpoint, blindfold or car trunk transport) and to a colleague’s account, some of the basics were observed.

It could hardly be called an atomic flash of enlightenment. It was more like what happens when you flip on a light switch wired to one of those energy saving bulbs: there’s a noticeable delay before anything starts glowing. Nevertheless, light eventually penetrated the darkness.

Twitter is, in a word (a 10-character word), intriguing. As a news junkie (except while on vacation) and purveyor of news stories, even I began to grasp how Twitter could be useful. How it could serve as an early alert system that something important, or at least interesting, is happening out there. That it could help me find out about events as they are happening, rather than hours after the fact. That it could let me know — constantly — there are interesting news stories, already written, out there to be gathered and read. And the access to all that information — and far more that is usually a little entertaining even when it’s completely irrelevant — is so much faster than e-mail or websurfing.

And so Dome went so boldly where so many others already are. Dome is now Tweeting! You can almost hear Bob Wiley (What About Bob?) exclaiming: “I Tweet.” “I’m a Tweeter.”

Dome isn’t Tweeting all that much to begin — there’s no mention of what’s on the lunch plate. But we are Tweeting to let you know when new articles and columns are posted, and occasionally when a comment on some Twitter topic is warranted. It’s a start. Be gentle, we’re new at this.

But new “uses,” or rather occasions to Tweet, are popping up all the time. Keeping up with the retwists and returns on primary election night via Twitter was informative, fast and fun (see Sarah Hubbard’s guest column, “Better Real-Time Election Coverage on Twitter”). So who knows where Dome will tread next.

Please tread along with us, by joining the magazine’s growing band of followers on Twitter. I’m pretty sure that means you’ll have to open a Twitter account yourself if you don’t already have one.

Go ahead. It’s time.