Late yesterday afternoon, my fabulous host here at Justin Plus One coined the term "eExhibitionist" to describe those people who are exhibitionists across the internet and social networking sites. I was so taken with the new term that I immediately added it to the bio on my Twitter profile, and suggested to Justin that we do our best to get the word inserted into the more popular internet vernacular. As someone who has been a digital resident of the internet since 1994, an early denizen of Hotmail and GeoCities and the then-brand-new Gay.com, I've a long history of being an eExhibitionist, and it is something about which I am deeply proud.
So I get a little ticked off when I read or see something online that seems to critique the practice of eExhibitionism.
While strolling through my Google Reader this morning after successfully warding off the panic attack that always threatens when the unread items in my feeds are nearing 1,000, I happened across this Flavorwire piece published late yesterday morning, "The Trouble with Current's The Twouble with Twitters." I'll spare you the definition of Twitter, which I happen to think if you still don't know then you probably have no business playing on the internet in the first place, and skip right to the point of the Flavorwire piece. Current TV, the Al Gore-backed global television network, released a promo for its season premiere of SuperNews! entitled "Twouble with Twitters," in which numerous critiques are leveled at the users of the microblogging platform, ultimately insinuating that the reason Twitter users are so addicted to the service is because they have no friends. (This summons, in one of the more humorous segments of the video, the Twitter Fail Whale, who proceeds to eat the helpless Twitter victims.)
It's difficult to tell if the promo is seriously criticizing Twitter's users, or if it is merely leveling its sarcastic jabs at Twitter users in order to attract viewers to "SuperNews!" One would hope that, as another social online service that hugely benefited from its affiliation with Twitter and Twitter's loyal, hardcore users throughout the recent United States election, Current TV would not seriously be critiquing the Twitter demographic. On the other hand, with all of the snark prevalent online these days, one never really knows anymore.
Not quite an early adopter of Twitter, I signed up with the service and published my first tweet on May 07, 2007. In those days I used Twitter for a few news and blog feeds, and to communicate with an elite circle of my friends regarding where we were at the moment, which parties we were headed to later in the evening, etc. I'm even shocked to remember that at that time I still received text message notifications from everyone I followed, something I can't imagine being able to handle today. In the nearly two years of my Twitter experience, I've seen it grow into a valuable and indispensable service to disseminate and receive information. Sure, with the recent explosion of new Twitter users who all seem to want to either sell you something or tell you how to write your SEO (because, duh, that is so hard OMG!), the intelligent user has to filter the noise to get to the good stuff. But the fact remains that, like them or not, like their users or not, social networking sites are here to stay, and are playing and will continue to play formidable roles in the exchange of information.
I won't defend the entirety of Twitter's eExhibitionist user base, because the stereotypes portrayed in Current TV's promo video most definitely do exist, and in their most base forms are highly annoying and angina-inducing. But the value of eExhibitionists in general should never be criticized. We're a pretty impressive group of intelligent, net-savvy people that should never be taken for granted, simply because of the two types of power that we wield: the talent of communicating important (or not) information to hundreds of thousands of people in under 140 characters; and the network of those who follow us.
They may not all be friends, no. But that does not mean they are not useful.
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