Recently I wrote about how I manage to keep up to date with Twitter for under 15 minutes a day and still gain a lot of value from the service.
I think this article - Let Them Eat Tweets - is a balanced, thoughtful look at the appeal and the pitfalls of Twitter.
My post's title comes from commentary on Bruce Sterling's recent suggestion at a tech conference that the finest pleasures involve permanence, and a phenomenon like Twitter is the currency of the poor. Regardless of how close it is to Sterling's original comments, the article is worth a read.
I've come close to these ideas before, when watching people who collect people, online and offline. I am very picky (okay, okay... extremely picky) about the people I have in my life. Observing "people collecting" (in this case, the followed and the followers) taken to extremes has always left a bad taste in my mouth.
You see something beautiful. So you want to possess it. As if, somehow, owning it would transfer the beauty, artistry and perfection to yourself. And while I've heard an aphorism along the lines of "people are the sum of their relationships" I don't think just collecting a large number of relationships (particularly shallow ones) is going to result in an increased richness of your own humanity. I think that richness of the self, borne out of our interactions with others, requires deeper connection. Then again, I'm an introvert, so really, I'm just spelling out what works for me! Perhaps a richness of self is only attainable for extroverts through a broad range of connections - though I would argue that a number of deep connections (that take 80% of your time, with the other 20% for shallow connections) are still required either way. Still. To me, when someone puts so much energy into networking and the acquisition of surface-level, rapid-fire relationships, to me it seems to be buying in to an "I own this, therefore I have value" mindset. They want to own whatever concept a social network represents to them. I'm not turning against tweets. However, the way we think is shaped by the tools we use, the language we speak. So it pays to pay attention to how we are using those tools, and what we are really thinking.