Twitter has never been very appealing because my cell phone
isn’t equipped to handle the necessary interaction. Sure, I could sit down at home, log in via my
laptop, and spend minutes (hours?) trolling through the laundry list of people
I follow just to see their quirky comment of the day. But I have Facebook for that. Should I feel the need to actually respond to
something, now we’re talking about a real relationship. I can either sit patiently staring at the
computer screen waiting for some kind of response or become that guy who gets
back to you hours (days?) later. That
puts a damper on the immediacy of communication that people have become
accustomed to these days.
Despite the technological limitations I would be forced to
operate within, I warmed to the idea of using another outlet to advertise my
thoughts to the world. Ego always trumps
practicality. Besides, who isn’t looking
for one more way to waste some precious minutes of the day? Twitter,
I can slot you in from 5:45 [after Facebook] until dinner every night. That was until I learned that each tweet
limited you to… 140 characters?!?!
Surely, this had to be some gross oversight by the creators. At 140 characters, I’m still warming up the
keyboard and making sure all the letters still work. I can make usability concessions but creative
ones? That is where I draw the
line. Nobody boxes Dave Younker into
such a small corner!
I am fully aware that I can be a bit verbose at times. Any co-workers who have read some of my
emails can attest to that statement. I
just can’t help myself. I’ve received
“good communicator” on my last couple reviews so I feel compelled to live up to
such praise. My boss even informally
mentioned that my communication skills are something a woman will appreciate
one day. Still waiting… In all seriousness though, I am working on trying to deliver the same
quality without as much quantity, at least at work. In order to practice, I am self-imposing a strict
1,000 word limit on this entry.
Nowhere was my wordiness as apparent as it was in my online
dating profile. Before I deactivated my
account, I came to the realization that my profile was longer than everyone
else’s. I subscribed to the belief that
people would want as much information about me as possible in order to make the
best informed decision they could.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone did that? Truthfully, I think I just saw it as another
opportunity to write about myself. I
would probably try to make a living off that if it were actually possible.
In hindsight, it’s possible that my profile (and emails)
contain too much information to be comfortably consumed in one sitting. With regards to a dating profile, there is
also something to be said for being succinct.
You don’t know the person so you’re going to make assumptions. The less you give them, the less likely they
are to misjudge you. As with emails, you
should strive to educate the audience on what is absolutely necessary so the
important messages do not get lost in the sea of words.
I once heard a guy lamenting about the existence of things
like Facebook and Google in terms of dating someone. You truly can pre-learn a ton about the
person. He was right; where is the excitement
of the discovery phase? It was a
refreshing point of view. It even made
me rethink the point of this entire blog.
At the very least, I may trim the fat from my profile if I ever decide
to reactivate it.
Once I resigned myself to the fact that many of my female
counterparts were not going to be as forthcoming in their profiles as yours
truly, I began to focus more on how
something was said versus what was
said. The ability to express one’s self
in coherent sentences is an underrated trait.
If her profile tried to merge TEN sentences into one or she chose the
wrong application of there/their/they’re, I had no desire to continue. Yeah,
but she’s really hot. OK, maybe I’ll
look at the rest of her pictures.
There is an entire generation of people growing up under the
pretense that it is acceptable to write using incomplete albeit phonetically
correct words. You get text message
conversations that go something like this:
Person: R u
comin 2nite?
Me: No.
Person: Your
lame
Me: Maybe
but you are you’re an idiot. See? I
can truncate characters too AND do it properly.
Of course there are times when I get lazy and stray from
proper capitalization and punctuation, such as during an informal IM
conversation with one person. However,
I try to make it a point to use actual words and not a bastardized, adopted
version of one. More importantly, I
understand the concept of stepping up my game when there is an audience or when
the situation warrants it. My dad showed
me some emails he received at work and I wondered if the author graduated high
school let alone college. What passes
for professionalism these days?
I think
No comments:
Post a Comment