TwitWit

There’s a scene in the Disney movie “Bambi” when the adolescent buck is strolling through the Technicolor springtime forest with his buddies Thumper (a rabbit) and Flower (a skunk). The three observe two lovestruck birds circling around each other and ask, “What’s the matter with them?” Wise old owl in the nearby tree says, “Why, don’t you know? They’re twitterpated.” Bambi looks disgusted and says, “Well, that’s not gonna happen to me.” Of course, before long the three friends meet ladyloves, and the twitterpation begins.

Which pretty much parallels my experience with Twitter, the social networking service that allows you to post scenes from your life in 140-character bites. First I didn’t get it, then I was enticed in, and now I am becoming infatuated by the possibilities.

I signed up a few months ago, after my friend Vicki, a fellow writer, said that I should reserve my name because social networking was important in marketing communications. Registering took approximately one minute, and immediately after Twitter obligingly gave me a list of people from my email address book who also have accounts. I signed on to “follow” all of them, mostly women friends and a few business associates. Then I waited to see what fascinating things were happening in their lives. And I waited, and am waiting still. Because none of us tweet anything. Ever.

Why, I wonder? Twitter bills itself as “without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.” What's important "right now" may mean links to intellectual and informative articles, if you’re Anderson Cooper; or “Up early today! At the Gym!” if you’re reality starlet Kim Kardashian; or “Rehearsal and Oscar parties tonight. Hope everybody is having a great weekend!” if you’re TV personality Cheryl Burke, who is obviously having a much more exciting weekend than I am. (If Schroeder or Jasper, my dogs, could tweet, the message would always be the same: “Right now! My favorite thing!”)

Even non-celebrity tweeting is a blast when it’s used to capture the small quirky moments of our days, as my college-age children and their friends use it. My daughter recently tweeted the heart-warming “DC + 70 degrees + sunshine + driving with the windows down = one very happy Maggie.” Her friend Laura posted, “Text from my mother: ‘Getting Hair Done. Going red.’ MAKE THE MIDLIFE CRISES STOP.”

There are eeks! moments too, such as when my son Tom commented on our companionably watching the scene in the hilarious movie “Election,” in which a high school student and her teacher share a Diet Dr. Pepper while Lionel Ritchie’s “Three Times A Lady” plays in the background. His tweet, which I will not repeat verbatim, was something about him and his parents finding the humor in a potential underage relationship—eeeeks eeeeks! I would not have represented it exactly that way.

But back to my own personal and valued contacts, and our reluctance to Tweet. My theory is that we feel cautious about saying something that could be misinterpreted or make us seem unprofessional. We’ve heard too many stories about ill-judged emails that go to the wrong person and never go away. And even if we’re just sharing some incident that made us smile, we wonder, does the newsletter editor I work for really want to know about the conversation I just had with the guy who sells me salmon?

Or maybe she really isn’t too concerned how I spend my days (as long as I meet her deadlines) and maybe I’m overthinking Twitter. To me, it’s more about finding the fun than anything else, a small record of quirky events (Tom’s friend Veronica calls it “a baby diary”) that cause us to pause and appreciate and maybe LOL.

So, in the spirit of twitterpation (and because I want to read good stuff from everybody else) you’re invited to follow me on Twitter. My next post might reveal that my other idea for this entry’s title was, “What the Tweet Do We Know?” Or maybe I’ll just post the story from my salmon guy. I think you would enjoy it.