A Twit, to tweet, excuse me?

For the most part, I love technology. I certainly love the internet having opted years ago to present my vision of a beverage centric magazine online as opposed to print. It was a rough road in the beginning, as many in the beverage biz did not get the concept of presenting a magazine online (some still don’t…). But I have discovered that there is a line in the virtual world sand for me and I simply will not cross it. Its name is Twitter.

The internet and mobile devices have changed the world. It has brought all of us closer together. It allows us to reconnect with long lost friends, colleagues, strangers that hold common interests, and so on. I can hardly imagine a day without using an internet based search engine to research everything from the trivial to the sublime (and occasionally the useful).

And then there is twitter. You can’t spell twitter without t-w-i-t. I have written before on how we, as a culture, have become our own “Big Brother.” For some reason that is well beyond my grasp – and I have spent an unhealthy number of hours contemplating this – people are eager to share their most trivial and most personal details. To do so one must believe that someone, or everyone, is sitting on edge waiting to learn about their every movement or thought. For better or worse, I don’t hold any such illusions. No one needs to know what I had for breakfast or what I drank last evening. In fact, I would be more than a little concerned if someone did want to know about these things. I suppose that stalking is just so 20th century.

Intrusions to privacy set aside, the aforementioned twitter compels its users to broadcast their thoughts and activities in 140 characters or less. Brevity may be the soul of wit but the bard would be seriously strapped by this requirement. I choose to write about the pleasures of life, wine, beer, and spirits at the center of these pursuits. I cannot accept any boundaries in my attempt to share my passion for life’s pleasures. I can’t and won’t reduce this zeal to the confines of a virtual bumper sticker. BevX doesn’t twitter.

I’m not launching a campaign against twitter or the next fad that will inevitably come along and dethrone the current rage. I just don’t care enough to get in a lather. I, like any other non-cave-dweller, have friends and colleagues who are members of the twitter nation. I simply chalk it up to different keystrokes for different folks.

As this rant will surely inspire some reaction from avid tweeters, I have just one small request: be true to your forum and please confine your remarks to 140 characters.