A quick thing about the @carrozo Twitter account.

“Why don’t you write a post about how your feelings of Twitter have changed of late so I can scroll right past it?”

OK then, I will.

I used to enjoy Twitter a great deal, and I suppose some of you reading this might have enjoyed my output there from time to time too. For the first year or so, I treated it almost exclusively as a broadcast tool, feeling that this was the medium where I could demonstrate my relish for the art of the text message, which I had honed with a handful of similarly-minded friends ever since getting my first mobile phone for Christmas in 2000. 

As time went on, my sense of tweeting evolved, and it became hugely satisfying to compose, read and exchange short pithy messages with incredibly clever people, to discover and share information the second it became available, to have your thoughts occasionally amplified to The World, to make friends outside the usual school/uni/work circles in a bustling but ultimately lonely big city like London, to get thrashed by the host of a popular property TV programme for a poor attempt at humour, to tell your autobiography over 9 hours in 248 tweets. 

I was a huge advocate of it, telling anyone who would listen of its serendipity, its constant novelty, its power as a broadcast mechanism for anyone, that you could meet people off it and become genuine friends; all the polar opposite to a slow, boring feed of people you already knew over on the claustrophobic blue network we all joined years before. 

The feed that never stopped was a constant attraction on the go, at your work desk, on the sofa, in bed at night, first thing when you woke up in the morning. And that’s great when you’re struggling to get a leg up in the world in the first couple of years after university, far from home and an established real life social network, working purely to pay the bills, with not much cash in the bank to see the friends you do have on the other side of town, or between jobs struggling to build up the confidence to ace that next interview. At any day of the week, at any moment, and within seconds, you can be entertained, educated, introduced, encouraged, distracted; and do all those things for others accompanied by instant gratification, appreciation, adulation. 

And of course that has its downsides. I don’t need to employ clunky metaphors about drug-use to show how, once you’re hooked, an endless supply of information, attention and feedback can distort your perspective about What Really Matters. 

So I began to more seriously question the ludicrous amount of time I needed to spend on it to extract any of the value I used to get from it; always pulling to refresh on the mobile app, or frantically checking the browser tab at work for the next dozen tweets. 

I also began to see another dark side to Twitter - either real or imagined - that others I respected also seemed to be picking up on for some time; the anti-tabloid brigade running their accounts with red-top fervour to assemble the digital flock that would peck apart the day’s straw-man; the rush to contribute an opinion about today’s celebrity death; fathers, mothers, boyfriends and girlfriends posting hundreds of micro-updates a day, their non-digital significant others all fading away in the imagined background; the best minds of my generation destroyed by the madness of tweeting along to reality television; the shit puns. Oh, the shit puns. 

Of course I was “better” by posting my contrarian thoughts in the midst of this madness, right? Well, no. I too would get incensed at what I would read and express outrage. I too had to rush my anti-this-or-that opinion out the door, or get “meta” on my followers’ asses, or express my supreme indifference to vaunted Hurrah!’s from fellow insouciants. I too let real-world relationships take second place to the shiny-shiny of the feed and I’m guilty of chiming in on Newsnight or Question Time or the latest Attenborough docu-porn with my own sarcastic narrative. 

But increasingly, I felt I was defining myself as for or against what the great hive mind was discussing.

And so, with little drama a few days into 2012, I deactivated my Twitter account, making a mental note of when the 30-day window before full deletion would end, happy to have disconnected and gained the resolve to finally spend my time doing other things I’d long suspected I should be doing instead. And if you think that I’m just beating up on Twitter, I’ve also cut live television out of my routine, because that’s just as much of a clustermindfuck and is a very different thing to sitting down and watching a TV show (another post for another day). 

I won’t bore you with the long list of small changes I’m implementing in my life that I hope will add up to a much greater result, but a big part of this includes giving myself the space and time to think, to form ideas in a more substantial and considered fashion, and get back to long-held ambitions as a filmmaker/writer/technologist and generally devote my energies to things that have a little more shelf life than a tweet.

“But how the hell am I reading this from a tweet you sent? And why aren’t you following anyone anymore?”

Well, I don’t need to be a digital marketing manager (I am one) to tell you that Twitter is not going away anytime soon. It is being baked in as a de facto layer of the internet, much like the World Wide Web which actually sits on top of it, although for most people they are one in the same. It is being used on low tech phones in the developing world where they can’t even access the internet as a bridge between the web and SMS and is now hardwired into Apple’s iOS with the same sharing significance as email. 

Wherever you are, it’s become essential to disseminating links to content elsewhere to obsessive, casual or accidental audiences in a way non-social RSS readers can’t hope to compete with. As someone who does work in “digital”, who has vague aspirations to be a producer of content in different media, who was lucky enough to build an audience of a couple of thousand over four years, it felt foolish to completely unplug from the biggest information utility ever created. 

And that’s how I first saw it, and how I’ve come to see it again. An information utility. In fact, those are @Jack’s words - the Founder and CEO of Twitter Inc. does not believe he runs a social network. I think he and his team have a long way to go to enhancing Twitter so there are better tools for curation, indexing, searching, organising what gets put on it, and I believe they will get there, but I just can’t swim in the endless stream anymore.

I’m aware that I’ve thrown a lot of witty, intelligent and friendly babies out with the bathwater in unfollowing everyone, and I hope you’ll realise it is not because of your “message”, but the manic medium that delivered them; I just can’t handle or make time for it anymore. Many of you are braver than I and will forge ahead in this digital frontier, or do consider Twitter a social network and will reward an unfollow with one in return, but for those feed-hungry boys and girls who’d like to stick around, I hope to post links to things I’ve produced, commented on or signalled as something worth paying attention to elsewhere here in future.

I know that some have very strong opinions about this kind of extreme asynchronicity on Twitter - like when a local MP micro-broadcasts messages all day but never follows or responds to the chatter of their constituents. Well, I’m happy to respond where there are no character limits, following/follwed dynamics or trolls snooping in, so feel free to drop me an email, and I’ll be happy to correspond back in return. Likewise, if you too have content that doesn’t quite fit in a tweet, that’s worthy of a longer shelf-life that you’d like me to watch, read or listen to, please do send it through. If you’re still with me, I’m sorry your follower count went down by one. Thanks for reading.

Matt