It’s interesting how this site has evolved since I began it. One thing I’ve been covering that I didn’t anticipate is social media, which for my purposes is adults like me going on FaceBook and a micro-blogging website called Twitter. I probably spend about an hour on Twitter a day, and the networking has been phenominal. Other Fort Worth bloggers who are there include 5KsandCabernets, @FortWorthology, and @WestandClear, and there’s several complete profiles of other Fort Worth “tweeps” at the Fort Worth Faces thread.

I was taken aback the other day as I read my twitter stream and someone posted about the number of “useless or meaningless tweets” the twitterverse contains. Immediately I wrote to the poster and suggested that “there are no completely useless tweets, they are useful to the person who wrote them and in almost every case, a few others as well. “

I asked if he shouldn’t consider revising his following list, since one man’s trash is another man’s teasure. And perhaps he’d find more meaning in the tweets of different tweeps. 

“I’m very happy with my following list,” he shot back. 

“Well,” I thought, “Maybe I am one of the meaningless tweets he wrote about?” Should I argue? Reason? I decided to just stop following him and take my own advice.

This event reminded me of the multitudinous nature of human correspondence, human thought, speech, existence. The guy was right in one way. There is far more out there than I can read, and much of it I don’t understand (especially the tweeps I follow who write half their posts in Portugese.)

Nevertheless, the idea of calling any tweets “useless” is going too far for me. True, there’s nothing wrong with consuming books, records, or twitter threads selectively. But one of my favorite songs when I was younger (okay, it still is) was “everyone is beautiful” by Ray Stevens. Even in the twitterverse, we need to show some modicum of respect for others’ right to tweet, the right to be different and to disagree.  Just because someone says something you do not find interesting does not mean it’s fundamentally meaningless. 

The day after unfollowing the guy who talked of useless and meaningless tweets I wrote this essay. And after that, I had to re-folllow him. Because I had to admit, even his grousing tweet complaining about the banality of other people’s lives had quite a bit of value for one person, and that was me.