Time

I’ve had my account since Twitter took off a couple years back. I’ve returned to it recently and realized that I actually prefer Twitter to Facebook. Why? Well, Facebook is a great way to “remember” birthdays and keep in touch with people you went to high school with, the crowd you used to hang out with, that friend of a friend who drove you home that one time, etc. Twitter keeps things simple: it gives me an insight of the everyday lives of people I actually know—people who I choose to follow whereas on Facebook, accepting a friend request is just the polite thing to do (unless it’s a creep). It’s interesting to see what kind of lives these people lead, what inspires them, what makes their day and what breaks it.

This assignment forced me to think twice about the kind of tweets that were being posted by the people I follow, and I saw that they mostly follow entropic time. Tweets are posted randomly throughout the person’s day and one doesn’t necessarily follow the other. In life, as well as in “The Garden of Forking Paths”, time is stellar or teleological, but unless we are constantly on our Twitter app updating every few minutes on what exactly is going on at that moment, all we can see are random little specks of a person’s day through their Twitter page. For example, a person I follow tweeted about how shitty their early morning commute was, and then tweeted about their fantasy basketball pick nine hours later. Those two tweets definitely do not have anything to do directly with each other; his fantasy basketball pick was not a result of him being stuck on the LIRR due to signal problems. I don’t know the chain of events that triggered an urge in that person to tweet, but I do know of two random, very specific moments in their day. That is what I consider to be the whole concept of Twitter: entropic time.