Twitterfied (Updated 11/29)

Twitter was just begging me to sign up last week to track the final day of the Presidential elections. After years of Twitter mockery, I finally caved in. My shiny new Twitter handle is @garth_hamilton.  Follow me at will.

Curious to read each candidate's tweets to their supporters on election night, I followed both President Obama and Mitt Romney. Incidentally, he with the most tweets won the election.  More power to him.

More interesting to me is the multitude of voices crying out to be heard during each Twitter millisecond. Each tweet, retweet, and reply is trying to find an audience. We have so much to say, but much of it ironically gets set adrift in a sea of selfishness and self-importance.

One of my early tweets about the new James Bond film was "favorited" by a TV personality that I really like but was not even following, and then he retweeted it to all 39,800+ (!) of his followers. Of course, some of those 39,800+ followers favorited my tweet and retweeted it to their followers as well.

As a new Twitterer, my brief but unremarkable flash of fame in the Twitterverse was unexpected and cool. Yet it did not yield a single meaningful human interaction.

Maybe that's not the point of Twitter.  I'm told it's about keeping up with current events. I'm told it's about following people you admire. Best case scenario: it's about conversation.

But in the end, perhaps we each just want to be heard.  With everyone talking, is anyone listening?

Update 11/28/12: 

Since signing up for Twitter, I've had some good times (making friends, posting concert pics from Winter Jam, getting real time score updates from my favorite sports teams) and bad times (having to change my password again after my account was hacked TWICE: on Thanksgiving, and then again yesterday).  I try to not tweet too often.

Update 11/29/12:

After that last update, I've now been hacked a 3rd time in the past week.  Google informed me that hackers attempted to access my Gmail account yesterday morning from Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Hungary.  Aside from the mass PlayStation Network hack of 2011, I've never been hacked before.  Are my nonsense passwords really that guessable?

Coming this extended Thanksgiving weekend on BlogSpot...

Baby Lena makes her debut TV appearance,

and the guys go backpacking into the Mt Hood Wilderness!