by Matt Shea | I have some foodie co-workers and blogger friends whose sense of social balance has been upset by their incessant tweeting and retweeting. An attitude of if you’re not on Twitter, you’re dead to me! is increasing common among them. It’s so powerful! It’s such a movement! It’s the way of the future! they say. Yet it is none of that is true, especially not the part when they say that everyone is doing it. A brand new Pew poll shows that Tweeters are actually a tiny sliver of a minority.
In this survey, 8% of online adults said they do use Twitter—with 2% doing so on a typical day.
But we do not need a Pew poll to tell us that reading local food-related tweets is like putting a bag of wasps over our heads and screaming like banshees. Doubt me, foodies? Go through the first 10 pages of your Twitter feed and subtract the banal, the egomaniacal and the purely promotional from the actually useful. If it is anything like my feed, it is 15% “look at me” narcissism from food bloggers and food tweeters on their way to some “invite only” circle jerk for a free meal and a goodie bag, 25% self-serving PR blasts from restaurants, 10% media trolls hoping to remain “current” no matter how embarrassing it looks to be angling for a mere 2% of the population, 35% poorly written observation (“my lemon pie tastes like lemon pie”), 5% meaningless opinion (“my lemon pie tastes sooo deelish”), 4% links to blogs expanding on one of the above, and 1% your mom complaining that you never call.
My point? Twitter doesn’t suck. It’s just that most of the foodie tweets we suffer do. If the yearning for information is noble, then the distribution of mundane garbage is just plain mean. So do better, k?
One word: Unfollow.
“Go through the first 10 pages of your _____ ___ and subtract the banal, the egomaniacal and the purely promotional from the actually useful.”
Two words. Scout magazine.
How awful.
Tuck Fwitter.
It has its uses.
As a follower of the same group of local foodies, this gave me a good laugh. If you think they suck as bad as they do — and I agree that some of them are as bad as you say — why don’t you just stop following them?