Farting on Twitter
Grandad July 18th, 2010
For reasons I won’t go into just now, I have been asked to analyse my attitude to Twitter.
For a start, I fucking HATE the name. What fucking moron thought that one up? Why couldn’t they come up with a good old fashioned acronym like Fast And Rapid Texting? That way people wouldn’t be so fucking smug about bragging that they FART a lot or the fact that they are keen FARTers?
I joined FART quite a while ago, and did my best to get the hang of it. I persevered, but it still made no sense. In fact, I see I have FARTed a total of 2412 times, so you can’t say I haven’t tried?
What baffles me is the banality of some of the FARTs. Why should I give a fiddler’s fuck what film you are about to watch / are watching / have just watched? Why should I give a shit if you are walking down Fifth Avenue? What care I if you have decided to treat yourself to another slice of cake? Good luck to you, but don’t bother me about it.
Don’t get me wrong – it does have its uses. It is good for lamming out a quick emergency cry for help – “Accidentally drank Paraquat. Where nearest hospital?” or “Does anyone know Obama’s password?” It is also excellent for advertising links and articles that people have found. The latter is the one use that I do have for FART, and I have my site set up that whenever I post, I FART. It lets people know when there is a new nugget of gold on my site. I know they are just waiting for it, and it notifies them that bit quicker.
I do get the odd chuckle out of FART, but not often. Some people just regurgitate old jokes, which is a bit tedious. Some people have a great way with words though and can provide a quick smirk. Some people can throw in a quick comment about an event or some other item which can raise a laugh, but generally it just isn’t worth the effort.
A while ago, I decided to try FART out as it it were one of those old text adventures, to see what reaction I would get. I would write something like “Grandad has entered. Looks around. Grandad leaves”. One or two got the gist of what I was at, but my theory is that most FARTers are too young to remember text based adventures.
That is the nub of it. FART is for the younger generation. They like the instant gratification, and the ease of writing a message in less than 140 letters. It requires no thought. Some say it gives a sense of community, but it doesn’t do that for me because there is little of the one to one communication that a blog [another despicable word] provides.
I think basically that there is little wrong with FART.
It’s just that I’m too old for it.
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