My New Guilty Pleasure

Korrin B.

May 17, 2009 - 4:00 PM

Something has finally made its way into to that part of my life that is reserved for the over-consumption of chocolate and the listening of cheesy pop music from Jesse McCartney. It is something relatively new to society and people seem to either love it or despise it. I resisted for quite some time, but it's official now. I have a new guilty pleasure and it goes by the name of Twitter.

Twitter seems pretty ridiculous, right? I mean, who cares what you are doing throughout the day? Well, perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. I think I need to have a brief description of it for my readers who are not entirely up on their social networking devices. For those unfamiliar with what it means to tweet, Twitter is a social networking tool that allows its users to send short updates on what's going on in their lives to anyone who subscribes to receive them. Therefore, if you decide to follow your friend, Bertha, every time Bertha types a new "tweet" onto her Twitter page, you will be informed of what it is. It could be something philosophical or it could just be something like, "I'm going to the store to buy more yogurt."

So, now that Twitter, or the act of tweeting, has been explained, it sounds a little ridiculous, right? You may ask, do people really need to know or care what I'm doing throughout the day? Can't they just call and ask if they care so much? The answer is, yes, they could, but it's just so fun to tweet it!

My roommate and I decided to sign up for Twitter about a week ago and it led to one of the most fun nights we've had. My roommate decided to sign up for Twitter because she heard she could talk to celebrities on it. I kind of just signed up for a lack of something better to do. Well, my roommate ended up chatting it up with Ashton Kutcher and I ended up having a blast just thinking up random, funny things I could tweet to the rest of the world. I guess you would've had to have been there the night we succumbed to Twitter in order to really understand, but the main point is that we spent the evening cracking up and tweeting to our heart's content. Good times.

I like Twitter because you can sign up to receive updates from places like CNN, the Daily Emerald, the EMU Ticket Office, or even the UO Annual Giving Program. It is a great way to keep up on fun events happening in Eugene soon or just the nation's current events. I also like it because it is so much simpler than something like Facebook. Facebook soon turns into an abyss of information, full of photos, wall posts, and personal biographies. Twitter is just a quick way to stay connected. There are no quizzes to take, no photos to comment on. It's just an update from the lives of those people you choose to care about.

I know there are and probably will be for a while, a lot of Twitter haters out there. It's understandable. I used to question the device myself. However, now I find it fun and informative. Guilty pleasures are great. Maybe one of these nights I'll sit and tweet about how I'm eating chocolate and listening to Jesse McCartney's new song "How Do You Sleep?"