Facebook and Twitter are making me lazy

Before status updates and microblogs, I used to write detailed blogs about the simplest of things. Some might say too detailed, but to those people I say kindly fuck yourself. I wrote blogs pages long about my adventures on the weekend with my friends, theories about anything that sprung to mind and even rambled about random things that encapsulated my mood at the time. It was fun for me because I got to write about my favorite subject; me, and fun for my few readers because I served as a scribe for our adventures.

Things have changed. I've found that I can squeeze an entire weekend into a one hundred and forty character description on Twitter. Why bother sitting here for hours writing about my life when I can use one witty remark to capture an entire experience. All those years of writing haiku seems to have given me a talent for putting more information into as little words as possible. I find the trick is to leave it open to interpretation, but not to the point where it's cryptic. People don't like cryptic messages. Well, I don't, anyway.

As for my blogs based on my mood, such as my long winded rant about how lives are decided by quantum physics which was inspired by an afternoon of listening to Nine Inch Nails and reading The Selfish Gene, they're almost non-existent now that I can elude to how happy, depressed or awesome I am by using Facebook's status updates. There is no character restriction that I'm aware of, but the general idea is to keep it short and sweet. Cryptic messages are even worse on Facebook because you do have the extra space to explain yourself, but they seem to be far more common too. Advice; if you try to sound mysterious, you'll most likely end up sounding like a tool.

There is also the fact that my status updates generally get a lot more readers and therefore comments than my blogs ever did. Being the narcissistic attention whore that I am, ten comments from random people I went to high school with gives me more elation than one or two comments from good friends. I can’t help it; I feed on comments and kudos like a celebrity feeds on publicity. I feel like a sellout, like an actor who couldn't find an audience in his indie films and took a role in a Hollywood blockbuster as a result, sacrificing integrity for fame.

I think I'll go update my Twitter, now.