Saturday, March 27, 2010

Why I Don't Twit, Twat or Tweet

Or have a Facebook fan page.

Or a MySpace page.

Or any other number of social networking tools for this blog.

Because I'll be damned if I can remember them all. When I was 18 I had a slightly drunken nose to chin collision with a guy twice my size. My nose crunched like a piece of styrofoam and exploded in a torrent of blood. When I woke up the following morning, my head was screaming but I still went to work. Under florescent lights for roughly 45 minutes, I ended up sprawled out at the front of the drug store I worked at screaming. An emergency room visit later and I had a concussion and I slipped into Vicodin land for the weekend. When I emerged from my haze, I left my memory behind. For the following three months I lost a good 80% of my short term memory. After that it slowly came back but not fully and it doesn't function as a normal 26 year old memory should.

Even if I could remember to keep on top of all those social networking thingies, I wouldn't bother with signing up for them. I think Twitter would be excellent for a type of emergency response system but for normal every day people . . . I just don't give a shit what you're eating, if you're in the shower (which is really fucking stupid, by the way, why not just hang a sign on your front door that says, I'm vulnerable, come rob me?), if you're going grocery shopping or whatever. And I'll be damned if I share that kind of stuff with anyone. It's not necessary.

And, in my eyes, it's not necessary for this blog to be linked up all over the place like Facebook and whatnot. Why? Why am I marketing my eyeballs out of my sockets? So I can shill more ARCs from publishers? Nah. So I can get more followers? If people haven't figured out by now, that number is insanely superficial and doesn't accurately portray just how popular any blog is or isn't. To get money? I lose money on this site and I have nothing I want to sell. So why am I going to pimp myself all over the place? Word of mouth has worked just fine up until now so I think I'll stick with that.

Plus, it's time focused on an area of my life where it shouldn't be. I'm a writer. I need to spend my time writing and editing if I want any kind of hope of getting published. To essentially waste my time promoting my book review blog in all of these places would take away my writing time. I procrastinate enough normally without all those distractions. Now if I were promoting my writing blog for the sake of my book that's coming out, entirely different story. This blog is a hobby. If other people want to join me in my hobby, great! If not, oh well! No skin of my back. But I'm not going to stress out over promotion. If I get found, I get found. If I don't, I don't.

So no, I will never have a Twitter. It's hard enough for me to update my personal Facebook page status once a day let alone having to stress over keeping a Twitter account updated. This blog will never have a fan page on Facebook that I create. If someone wants to create one for me, super! But I won't do it. Why? You guys come here. I'm not going to say anything different there that I wouldn't here. Redundancies are time wasters in my eyes.

I am on Goodreads. I do have my site tracked by some blip sites. I comment on other bloggers' posts that strike me as wanting to comment on. I email back and forth with bloggers and publicists and authors. I host a couple of events simply because I want to. But that's about as interactive as I'm going to get. If you want to contact me, feel free! I'm not going to stab you with a fork. But for the most part I blog in a bubble. I do my own thing and I only get involved in things that I feel passionate enough to get involved in. Everything else, meh. I'll leave it to the super passionate book bloggers to handle. They're much better at it than I am.

10 comments:

Audrey (holes In My brain) said...

I just did a school project on how much useless stuff people post on Twitter that makes me worry about my own generation.

I'm okay about Facebook because to me, it's more like 'connecting with friends' if you get what i'm saying (well at least, for me). On Twitter, you just follow hundreds of random people. I rarely use either though.

You're right, i really don't care if you're eating a sandwich. :P

nice post!

in which a girl reads said...

Whoa about the anecdote at the beginning! *hugs*

I don't have a facebook or a myspace. I do have a twitter--and I know exactly where you're coming from because I really, REALLY thought twitter was the dumbest thing ever--and I don't want to know minute details of people's lives either. Twitter still kind of confuses me because it SHOULD be OH SO WRONG but I kind of like it now I've joined. I mostly just use to it as a sort of a live chat with bloggers/ writer friends, and occasionally to link to new posts.The reason I like it is that I get to talk a bit more with people :) And also--agents and authors on there sometimes give really good tips.

But I really love this post because you laid out what you're comfortable with/ how your blogging style works. And I love your comments--I've been seeing some around the blogosphere and they're always very insightful and awesomely put :)

I'm going to friend you on goodreads :)

in which a girl reads said...

Oops, forgot to add: Despite by my long ramble on twitter I didn't mean to say that you should join, haha. I'm still amazed I even manage to get around the blogosphere at all, I'm so usually socially inept with internet networking.

SiNn said...

i have a twitter page and i only use it to promote contests and interview i have attended and my facebook is for family and friends

i had a head injury too so i cant remember alot i have a whole lotttt of postit notes to remind me

Alea said...

There are good things about Twitter though too. I'll be talking with my friend and she'll be like well how did you find that out, or who told you and 9 times out of 10 twitter helped me out with this random thing. With either some research or trying to locate something. That's why I like it. And facebook, well I'm just on there to play farmville. :P

StephTheBookworm said...

I agree 100%. Thank you for being the one to say this haha.

Jaydee Morgan said...

Nothing wrong with knowing where you stand and sticking by it. Plus, you're right. We know where to find you :)

Helen's Book Blog said...

I'm on facebook with a personal account (only visit it 2 to 3 times a week). I am a teacher librarian so my library has a fan page for students and parents to see what we're doing.

I do have a twitter account. But, confession time, I "push" my blog there and then forget to use it. :-) I have heard how useful Twitter is for people who are looking for answers to problems/questions that they have (research type of things). It turns out that students, in general, aren't on twitter.

I am getting more and more aware of not putting the boring daily stuff out there. I use facebook to keep in touch with friends who are far away and, since I am in charge of my high school reunions, to keep in touch with classmates.

April (BooksandWine) said...

Like Choco, I use twitter as a live chat with bloggers. I also like it because it allows me to interact with authors, plus I come across people whose blogs I might not have seen before on twitter. However, it really is your own personal choice to be on twitter or not, and that's totally cool.

That said, looks like you are doing pretty awesome doing your own thing!

Donna (Bites) said...

Yeah, everyone has their own thing ad their own way of handling it. Personally I have Yahoo! or MSN Messenger if I want to chat with people and if I need research for anything, I'm part of an excellent writing forum that gives me all the information I need and then some. I guess I'm just more old fashioned. I don't feel the need to be right on top of all the information all the time. I'm quite content where I am and how I function with this blog. And it's worked for me so far!

It boils down to do I want to be a book blogger or a writer? They both require a lot of time. The former if you want to be at The Story Siren level and the other if you want to be published. Since publishing is my goal, that's where my time needs to be. I have a lot of distractions already in my life and adding more is not conducive to effective time management. Plus Twitter would be totally lost on my anyway. I refuse to access the internet through my phone and during the week I'm only accessing book blog stuff once a day in the evening. Kind of defeats the purpose, really.

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