tweets, blogs and facebook updates

as a greeting card designer i am often reminded how obsolete the pen has become. as a part time employee hoping for a full time salary in a building full of magazines teetering the edge of collapse, i am constantly told that paper is something of the past. apparently we don't read anymore. we watch. or we scan rss feeds. we don't write. we blog. in fact, even blogging has become "so last year". we twitter. (we tweet? is that actually the correct way of saying that? are there actually more correct ways of conjugating a made up word?)

i have been thinking about it a lot lately, and twitter absolutely fascinates me.

for those of you who don't know what twitter is (are there people out there who don't know what twitter is yet?)- here is my favorite description of the phenomenon:

"if you're the last person in the world to not know what Twitter is, here's a simple explanation: it allows you to post text messages to the web. You have a 140- character limit per posting, and you can "follow" other users (in aggregate or individually) and they can "follow" you. It's kind of like Facebook's status updates, but available for anyone to see. To read an individual user's Twitter page in some semblance of order is beside the point. Most individual Twitter pages resemble a poorly written blog. If you looked at mine, you'd see updates from a recent football game I attended, a joke about the inauguration, and an alert that a friend of mine was getting a tattoo. My Twitter page is lame. Most are. What happens collectively is what matters." -Will Leitch
(to read the full article check here)

so basically, to twitter (to tweet?) is to keep the universe updated with your current thoughts, actions, mood, jokes, and random observations. to twitter is to hope that someone cares.

the idea fascinates me. it is obscenely personal and remarkably impersonal at the same time. it is not in any way private like a letter yet the things you read are equally as mundane or as deeply intimate. is this the future? not telling each other our feelings, but instead uploading them to the internet? obliterating the birthday card in exchange for a facebook wall post?

be honest, how much have you learned about your friends lives recently via facebook status or twitter activity?

yesterday i read an article on gawker entitled "I Tweet Therefore I am". it argues that the twitter phenomenon is evidence of an under-developed sense of self and an overdeveloped sense of narcissism in todays generation. read the article. it is interesting.

personally, i don't "tweet". sometimes i would like to think that i am above that sort of thing, but deep down i know it isn't true. it's probably much more honest to admit that i just haven't gotten around to it. i long for connection just like the rest of them... and while i don't have my own twitter page, i update my facebook status just like the rest of 'em. i often catch myself reading other people's twitters to get a handle on their life. why? why? why?

the article quotes an MIT professor saying "It's so seductive. It meets some very deep need to always be connected, but then it turnsout that always being trivially connected has a lot of problems that come with it."

i think she's hit the nail on the head- sort of. we each have a deep-seeded need to connect and to feel connected. i agree. but we are never fulfilled. hence the "problems" that she describes that soon follow such trivial connection. if we actually wanted to feel connected, we would connect. we would stop sending tweets into cyberspace and phone a friend. the problem is we are a generation that isn't quite sure what we want. we want connection-- ok... check. We want casual. we want convenient. we want quick. we are embarrassingly voyeuristic. we want to watch and to be watched. we need constant affirmation that we are living and breathing. constant affirmation that we are caring and feeling. and we are smart. there will be newer more casual, more convenient, more affirming, quicker ways of connecting invented every day. blogging has become tweeting will become something will become something.... until we are simply uploading our heartbeats online for people to follow. but (i think) i stand firm in my argument that we will continue to be unfulfilled. the more that these technologies distance us from our friends and from ourselves, the more worried we should become.

i'm down with the twittering and the constant updating and the posts to cyberspace, but we are a generation that needs grounding.

not to sound way too over-reaching, but i think that's what i'm trying to do with jujuisgoodluck. i only just realized that that's the best way i can answer the question "why greeting cards? why now? who cares?” greeting cards. the anti-twitter.