Twitter-addict

I was talking with a friend about the importance of Twitter. You must be there - she was saying-; if you are not in Twitter you don´t exist, and the more followers you have the more you are.

It may sound excessive, but my friend is right. In the era of social networks you have to proof that you are here. Silence is invisible, so if you don´t talk you are nothing.

Susan Sontag died before Twitter was born, but she said something that could be applied to the way we live today. When you are traveling, she said, taking photographs is a way to feel at home; it is hard to face the unknown, so it feels safer to look at it through your camera lenses, as if it was a film you could be watching from the couch in your living room. She didn´t live the digital era, but her words are even more certain since we went digital. 

If you go to the Louvre and look for La Mona Lisa you will find it on  hundreds of camera displays. The most amazing thing is that people are looking at it on the screens. They are looking at their cameras and they miss the painting. It would be the same as if you were in a heavenly beach with white sand, crystal water and dolphins swimming around and you spent time sending a picture to your Twitter followers. The time you spend thinking about them is the time you miss the dolphins.

When we become Twitter-addict  everything changes. You tweet the sights from your window, the beautiful place you find in a foreign country, the film you´ve just watched, the restaurant you are in or your last thoughts, and all must be told in the minute it happens. Just like digital  photography: you have to see things through the screen to make them true.

Twitter is not a way to exhibit your live. It goes far beyond. You´re writing your biography. Long ago, someone used to write it once you were dead, but now you do it in the minute it happens, and you do it yourself. So we spend so much time showing our lives to  other people that we have no time left to learn from what we are living. We are running away from silence. If the rest of the world knows what I am, I don´t need to think what I am.

So here is an exercise to be made: go to your children play at school and don´t record it with the camera. Look at the beautiful scene in a new country and don´t take pictures. Listen to that amazing news and don´t make a tweet out of it. In those minutes maybe you´ll learn something new: life goes on, so squeeze it in silence.

(And yes, I am in Twitter too... @valmedetoledo)