Tweet Out
Posted by Rachel Balducci in Family on Friday, August 07, 2009 9:50 PM
You may have heard about yesterday’s Twitter blackout, when the uber-popular social networking site was the target of a “denial-of-service attack” that left the site out-of-commission for several hours.
I was aware of the problem, which from my vantage looked basically like a three-hour gap in information. I was actually offline the entire time Twitter was down, and by the time I got online it was all a little hiccup, a pause in my world of 140-character information. Vast coverage of the story was interesting to me at the level of a website being targeted and crashed for political purposes.
This evening, however, I saw a report at cnn.com with an alarming headline: “Twitter blackout left users feeling ‘jittery,’ ‘naked.’”
Several people reported feeling off-kilter and out-of-sorts because Twitter was not at their disposal.
Said one college professor: “For many people, and not just young people, the Web is not just media, it’s actually a place where they conduct their lives or a portion of their lives.”
Which of course left me wondering just how addicted a person can get to 140-characters on a screen. This sounded a bit extreme. Are you so plugged in that the recent blackout had a profound effect? I do indeed love my Twitter, love the pithy one-liners and tinyurl’s, but an absence of Twitter does not leave me feeling as though the end is nigh. The connections and friendships I have formed through the internet are wonderful, but none of it is a substitute for real life (if you really want to get to know someone, start chatting with them on the phone).
On that note, TGIF—I hope you will enjoy lots and lots of fresh air and sunshine this weekend! As a wise woman noted recently, “only real blackberries, please.” (Perhaps I’d add: my phone blackberry is great, but no substitute for the real thing!)
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