Introduction to a Twit

Urban Dictionary defines 'twit' in many different and colorfully descriptive ways.  For example:

twit	646 up, 288 down
	buy twit mugs, tshirts and magnets The kind of person that makes a retarded chimp look smart. They often can be found leaving definitions for their own name or the names of their friends on urbandictionary.com Joe smith definition: 1: joe smith is the coolest man alive, look at me i wrote my name i am joe smith 2: joe smith is a twit by truefate May 20, 2004

twit	513 up, 236 down
	buy twit mugs, tshirts and magnets A moron with absolutely no sense. See also Paris Hilton by Cheyenne Jan 3, 2005

This world is full of these twits.  In fact you see more and more of them everyday, and I think I have become one.

It all started about four months ago when I was introduced to a life beyond your basic cell phone. In a sense, I had been stuck in the stone age.  My cell phone had the basic capabilities with a camera.  Occasionally I would live a little on the edge and purchase a game or ring tone. Honestly it was more of a portable gaming device than anything.  I was always playing some kind of card game whether I was on my lunch break, cigarette break,  coffee break, waiting in the lobby of an appointment, it didn't matter.  So, tragically there came a day when somehow my phone fell on the ground and was run over.  Replacement was a necessity, so then I was talked into a Droid.

The day I got that new phone I was mesmerized, "Oh, wow, I can't believe it can do this!"  This was a completely new concept for me; a handheld computer, a phone, an organizer, a camera/camcorder, a voice recorder-

And that's not all!

One of the features this phone offered was its compatibility to Facebook and Twitter.  Prior to this phone I had been strictly recluse.  I had no intentions of signing up for any of the popular social sites.  After all, I'm not a social person- was my line of thinking.  Ironically, I had the same feelings about blogging.  Social fads, bah humbug!  But somehow Twitter beckoned me, lured me in.  And truthfully I didn't understand it at first, I didn't even like it.  Then I began following various celebrities.  (In a non-threatening non-stalking way, I swear!) Between Adrianne Curry and her steamy Twitter pics, and Seth MacFarlane with his blunt humor; my head was reeling, and I couldn't get enough.  So then I had to follow more people to fill the timeline more, which resulted in me spending even more time with my face buried in my smartphone.

So much of my free time went into playing with my phone, and more specifically Twitter.  It was like an addictive drug when I got my first response from a celebrity.  So that prompted me to want to be more aware of current events, that way I would have something slightly intelligent to say.  It became my hobby, reading the news, refreshing the page when all the stories that interested me were read.  When that ran out I was left with politics.

Politics were as interesting to me as listening to Ben Stein read "The Great Gatsby", but it was one topic I could definitively say I knew nothing about.  So, I started reading it, taking many breaks to look up various words, phrases, people or dates.  Long hours went into just reading and researching, trying to learn something useful about politics.  And you know where that got me? Frustrated and angry- at our politicians, all sides; democratic, republican, independent- whatever.  I really began to see them all as the slimy lying bastards they have always been.  But I digress.

What I have now realized is that this so called smartphone has changed my life in such a short time.  I had something called 'standards' once upon a time.  I had beliefs and these 'standards' that kept me from falling into one of the many passing fads that drift by.  My smartphone caused me to want to branch out to keep up with the world around me, to somehow impress a bunch of people I wasn't entirely convinced were real, to seek approval from my anonymous cyber peers.  Perhaps when you look at this from a positive perspective, I have bettered myself more intellectually. And yet I am left feeling violated because the change was something I wasn't quite aware was happening until I was completely emerged. 

I have been slowly weening myself off of my smartphone and have successfully ignored its online features for a full 24 hours.  Am I on the road to recovery from my phone?  That remains to be seen.  

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Albert Einstein