#1065 Twitter Twaddle

You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard how everyone is all-atwitter over Twitter. But now the horror stories are starting to emerge.
Twitter is essentially a gossip network. You can only send out messages of 140 characters. You can send your messages from your phone, if you like, to your Twitter page, which then can be automatically accessed by the computers or phones of your “followers.”
You send, and they get, “tweets.”
I suppose I’ve avoided twittering for primarily that reason. I’m almost okay with sending a short status message to all and sundry. I’m not comfortable with sending a tweet.
But my Luddite tendencies and dignity sensibilities notwithstanding, Twitter has caught on in the world of gossip like a profane union of People Magazine and the National Enquirer on Octomom fertility drugs.
Actors, particularly, are jumping in with both thumbs, managing their publicity (or having it managed for them by paid tweeter minions) and garnering thousands of followers. Which they then compete with each other to compare. Kevin Spacey has 800,000 followers, Ashton Kutcher has a million.
But like all gossip, it can go terribly bad. There are no controls. Jeff Goldblum was reported dead by the New Zealand media on the basis of what turned out to be a bunch of Twitter Tweet twaddle. Jonah Hill has someone impersonating him, sending bogus tweets and getting him in trouble with various friends and movie directors.
Some folk on Twitter briefly fulminated a Tweet storm of gossip, urging people to visit not Sarah Palin’s Twitter page but her Qwitter page.
Corporations are hiring Twitter fishers, monitoring the webwaves for bad PR.
But I saw something the other day that really worried me. A young lady had her flip-phone open and she was texting something. But she was resting her phone on the shelf of her bulging extremely pregnant belly. Don’t they tell people that phone waves are dangerous to your brain? And tell guys not to keep their cellphones in their front pants pockets?
I know it sounds like a cutesy-pie harmless thing to do. But is tweeting over your fetus a good idea?
America, ya gotta love it.