50 Million Tweets Are a Waste of Time Each Day

[p05esto]

Twitter/Facebook and the rest of the "look at me" generation are totally useless. The ony social activity I like to participate in and read are comments on artciles that are to the point and relevant to the article.

Reading about lame people who do little with their lives and then tweet about it and litter Facebook with their nonsense is very annoying. I've never used Twitter, but I know exactly what it's all about.

 

[Tab54o]

Twitter is one of the DUMBEST things to come out of the 21st century.

 

[anarkeygodslam]

If I had a twitter account, I would have instantly tweeted this article!

 

[Hazbot]

I need to tweet this!

 

[Northwestern]

Proud to know I have never contributed to one of those tweets.

 

[fixxxer113]

Although I agree that most tweets will probably not contribute much to the improvement of humankind, judging them according to likes and dislikes (and the lack thereof), is pointless... Peoples subjective opinions are not safe criteria for any statement's importance. If anything, filters that supress "disliked" tweets (or any other kind of post for that matter) will only serve to lead opinions to certain directions, wether the are commercially, politically or otherwise motivated.

Let's say a scientist tweets about an important new discovery concerning physics. Reactions to this could be as follows:

a)The average inhabitant of this planet would be more interested in Justin Beiber's underwear color so a large percentage of twitter users will simply not care.

b) The usual crowd of religious nuts will start protesting and as usual get a lot of mainstream media attention because they make for good TV (wich in turn makes money for said media).

c) A few people, fellow scientists and others who actually are interested in the world around them, will like it.

So, will that tweet be a "waste of time"?