Since I first became aware of this thing called Twitter back
in 2008, I have questioned its value, just as I would with any new gadget or
any trend in our cultural zeitgeist. I am by nature a contrarian, one who is not
inclined to go along with something new just because it’s “the latest thing.”
It’s not that I won’t come around eventually—I often do—but I require
demonstrable proof of worth before jumping on the proverbial bandwagon. That’s
because I really don’t believe in bandwagon-jumping in general. Performing an
action because it’s being marketed to you, because someone is spending a great
deal of time and effort to get you to buy into it, just doesn’t seem logical to
me, and never has. I guess part of this mentality was formed by my own personal
circumstances, and by growing up in Washington DC in the 70s, a period of
intense cynicism and self-interest. My father was a lawyer, and I learned
fairly early on that I had better have my facts down if I wanted to hold my own
with him. Dealing with him was often difficult because he had a brilliant mind
and rarely lost an argument, legally or otherwise. He would hold forth on and
we would all be forced to listen whether we wanted to or not. It got so that I
would take the opposite point of view whenever I talked to him just to
antagonize him, just to get his attention at all. It became a defense
mechanism, one that did no good for our father-daughter relationship and which
made forming any sort of personal relationship very tricky. I spent years
keeping people at arm’s length because of my argumentative nature, because of
habits formed around the dinner table. But I gained a great deal of respect for
facts in the process.
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