Have I Been Assimilated?

Your diarist wonders if it’s even possible for a working writer to resist Twitter at this point, especially during a political season. The short answer is that it’s possible but not feasible — not if you want your opinions to have some currency anyway.

Several Twitter accounts have been set up for me over the years by friends and employers. I had treated them mostly with indifference. Then I started blogging for Patheos and the powers that be (ahem) strongly encouraged me to start a Twitter account.

I obliged them (@jeremylottdiary) only because a service was found that automatically posts from here to Facebook and Twitter without me having to lift a finger. It seemed the perfect compromise. After the initial, rather painless set-up, that whole “social media” thing would take care of itself.

Then a friend pointed out to me that the way to really build up your Twitter following was by “following” a bunch of people and “re-tweeting” them. I did a bit of that, but assured myself that this did not count as being fully Twitterpated. After all, I wasn’t wasting a bunch of time on Twitter golfing up new content.

Then Real Clear World asked me to blog the foreign policy debate. I said yes, of course I’d do it, and then learned that we’d be blogging by tweeting. So I obliged. I mean, I had the account there and everything, so why not?

You can see some of the results of that here. The RCW aggregators only used maybe half of my tweets and there was an awful lot of re-tweeting and new followers on Twitter. Does that mean I’ll stick around and become a regular Twitter-er or Tweeter or Twit or whatever the kids are calling it these days?

“No, no and a thousand times no!” I say with fake confidence. But the road is wide, the slope is slippery, and Cassandra is getting ready with those I-told-you-so’s.