• I’m flying off to Japan on Wednesday to visit my uni friend Krzysztof. He has a Polish name with far, far too many consonants. Kris and I went to university together, and since graduating has been working in  Japan. I’ll be staying with him in Osaka for a week, visiting Kyoto at the weekend.
• I’ll be arriving early on Thursday morning, and I predict staying awake will be a bit of a challenge. Fortunately Japan has a sufficiently good coffee culture: it’s apparently easy to find good coffee in Japan. Even better, decaf coffee is very difficult to find. Fine. I never saw the point of it. According to the previous link, the removal of caffeine is treated as a health hazard. Well, that sounds good to me!
• Another reason for the visit is to escape the uncomfortable state of waiting. I’m currently waiting to hear whether I’ll be moving to Germany or London, depending on possible outcomes. Patience is not a strong point. I worked out I can wait wherever I want in the world, with the same results. A bit of dithering, window shopping on Opodo, and three days later, I booked a flight to Japan, and of course I’m very excited and happy about this.
• Travel and learning about the world is, apparently, a theme. Most recently, I’ve become interested in the Middle East. This started after hearing about an incident of anti-Semitism directed at someone I know. To start to amend my ignorance on the subject, I read Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. The book is obviously an argument in favour of the existence of the state of Israel. It lays the facts out and addresses all the arguments and criticisms. For the sake of intellectual curiosity and better knowledge about the subject, I’m also trying to penetrate Edward Said’s Orientalism, which I’ve been meaning to read ever since my good friend Sharmin mentioned it back in 2004. Said is—why are academics usually referred to in the present tense, even if they died years ago?—an interesting fellow, not to mention an influential academic and pro-Palestinian activist.
• Speaking of culture and travel … I’m wondering if the internet produces Third Culture Kids. And can you become Third Culture?
• I return from Japan on the 27th August, in time for this year’s dConstruct in Brighton, which I hope is as excellent as last year’s. Naturally I love the theme, which is “designing for tomorrow”. The scheduled talks look incredible and I’m lucky enough that it’ll be the second time I’ve attended a talk by Adam Greenfield.

Excuse the title.

Prem asked in the comments on my last post:

If Twitter kills the small-talk, then maybe that’s for the best. Get it out the way, in one go, in public… then, when meeting up with people, there’s a greater hope of cutting straight to the deeper issues of life. Do you find this happening?

First, small talk is necessary, as it sets down the groundwork for a more interesting conversation. Even a greeting is an example of small talk. In Mandarin, “Have you eaten?” is a common greeting, which is asked even if it’s not convenient for the host to serve food.

Second, I don’t believe undirected tweets count as a conversation. A tweet is something you publish for everyone to read. The tone might be conversational, eliciting advice, or imply participation, it is not directed specifically at you to solicit your esteemed personal response. You can follow someone’s tweet series about losing their dog and say nothing.

It reminds me of Big City Syndrome, where community spirit has diminished, and there’s always the assumption someone else will come to the assistance of the woman who just fell over and is struggling to get to her feet. There’s something lonely, even solipsistic, about Twitter.

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It’s worth noting that Twitter wasn’t designed to be a conversation platform. That’s shown in its lack of design support for conversations, and its lack of support for retweeting. It’s a publishing platform, not a platform for intimacy—though I’m grateful to still be in touch with people I no longer live in the same vicinity with, no matter how ambiently.

A personal frustration for me is that although you’re exposed to people’s lives, thoughts, and idiosyncrasies, there’s something glass-cage-like or zoo-like about it.  While I don’t agree with everything Archbishop Vincent Nichols says in his criticism of Facebook and social networking sites—or at least, how the BBC has portrayed it—I think there might be something in it.

Like I said, I’m sticking around on Twitter, but it’s fun to analyse the way we’re communicating and how it’s changing, even the negative side to it. I plan to carry on tweeting about my cats.

If you pay attention to someone’s tweets, you’ll learn an awful lot about them. Your mind hoards all these little facts, like where they get their coffee, what they thought of a film, and what they like doing.

Sadly, you no longer need to ask questions. Facebook has the same problem.

As Cennydd put it:

Apart from killing small talk, I’m tempted to delete my Twitter account for how much time I spend reading my feed when I could be reading—oh, I don’t know—Ulysses. Or about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I’d been ignorant about for so long. But I’m keeping Twitter around, for now.

Why I haven’t deleted my Twitter account yet.

Fear of Being Out of Touch

I’m frightened by the idea of not knowing what people are talking about. I realise this is an irrational fear, and I’ll still know what’s important from reading blogs. I realise I can simply subscribe to tweets without posting, but that’s out of the question, too; the urge to respond to a tweet, or update my followers with the latest disaster exploits of my new kittens, is astonishingly powerful.

The Need for Ambient Intimacy

Twitter’s a bit of a weird medium. Intimate, yet cold. There is a wall between you and your followers. There is no guarantee anyone following you will remain a follower: they’re fickle and will unfollow you if you post something annoying. In addition to that, even if they’re apparently following you, there’s no guarantee that someone’s even listening to your updates—maybe they’re following 20,000 people. Maybe you’re not on their priority list in TweetDeck.

I follow 188 accounts, some people, some RSS feeds, and I read all of them. I use it to stay in touch with my close friends, but I also have lots of acquaintances (but not BFFs) I want to stay in touch with. Twitter’s the perfect medium for it. This is not unrelated to the other reason I don’t delete my Twitter account: fear.

So I’m sticking around for now. Grudgingly.

I’ve adopted the philosophy that I’ll keep much in my life mysterious, unpublished on Twitter. There’s stuff you can only discover if you ask me questions, and even then, I may not answer. But at least it’ll be a semblance of a conversation, right? Plus, I’ll need to keep some stuff for my autobiography.

The other thing I resent Twitter for is how self-conscious I’ve become about writing. I apparently have several hundred people following my updates, with maybe 20% of them who are actually humanoid. And perhaps only half of the humanoid followers are actually listening. Even so, the number makes me anxious—and I resent that I care what listeners think about what I’m tweeting about lunch.