Twitface

It's funny how we sometimes do things without thinking. Occasionally, the lack of conscious thought proves to be a disadvantage, like when someone crosses the road without thinking and becomes another road safety statistic. More often, however, we do things without thinking simply because the reasoning behind it goes without saying; the mentality of the decision is so seemingly straightforward that the brain bypasses 'ponder' mode and just gets on with the job.

Usually, such decisions come and go. Some, though, do not; the decisions where we opted not to do something, where the option to change our minds lingers, does not always disappear into obscurity as quickly as others. On the occasions when such decisions, made without thinking, are suddenly brought forward, once again, to the centre stage of our minds, it is interesting to explore the thought processes that initially occurred when the decision was first made. Sometimes we learn why we didn't dwell on it.

I say this because such an occasion recently happened to me, and I discovered that the reason I decided what I decided, without thinking about it, was because thinking it over would just get me unnecessarily angry and worked up. And lyrical. Hence this. Sorry about that.

The other day, someone asked me "Why don't you connect your Twitter account with Facebook so that your tweets will appear on your Facebook profile?" This threw me for a moment, as the concept, as constantly evident to me as it was and has been for ages, hadn't really jostled through, and to the front of, my hypothetical to-do list and announced itself as a practical and logical idea at any point; it sort of hung about, in the areas of my mind that teetered on peripheral, close to plummeting into the abyss of discarded ponderings, and never really drew attention to itself. Basically, what I mean is that without ever dwelling on my reasoning, I never considered connecting Twitter to Facebook as a good idea.

So I was taken aback slightly when this person - a real-life human being, with opposable thumbs and a digestive tract - suggested the idea to me again. This idea, something that I had always known about but had ignored because common sense told me to, was being dragged through the crowd of thoughts, into the spotlight of my conscious mind, by someone who showed no hint of irony or sarcasm in their facial expression or tone of voice. This person was being serious. And it caused me, for the first time, to take a long hard look at my decision and try to understand the subconscious reasoning behind it.

Twitter and Facebook are not the same thing. Not by a long shot. Sure, they 'borrow' ideas and gimmicks off one another, and some people (trying, no doubt, to be hilarious) say that it's getting harder to tell the difference between the two websites. Take a look at Twitter and Facebook; compare them for yourself and you can clearly see the differences.

Facebook, for a start, is MASSIVE. Not just in an 'everyone's got it' kind of a way, but also in the sense that there is so much to do on Facebook. You can not only post updates, you can play games, get in touch with long-lost acquaintances and... well, the list goes on. It goes on for a long time. So we'll leave it there.

Twitter, on the other hand, really only has one function: sharing. Whether it be sharing links, gossip, news, personal information (in a 'how has your day been?' kind of way, before you start thinking like that) or a funny joke, Twitter handles it exquisitely well, employing the brilliant 'retweet' and 'hashtag' functions. Sharing such things on Facebook, on the other hand, can result in a few 'wacky' friends commenting underneath with some barely-comprehensible attempt to be funny and no consideration for you, the poster. As the notifications go up, the aura of outward integrity of the thing you posted goes down. Tut, tut, tut. Best tweet it, then.

When you're on Facebook, you feel like you're in a kind of social bubble; no matter how eventful your time on Facebook may be, what happens in the bubble stays in the bubble, and outsiders are likely to never know it ever happened. Of course, with the amount of friends the average Facebooker has, and the amount of other friends those friends have, the closed-endedness of it all isn't as noticeable. But it is there. It's like being in the internet equivalent of a large village in Norfolk. That witty retort you posted, no matter how brilliant, will, if you're very lucky, be read by a friend of someone who 'like'd or commented on it, but ninety-nine percent of the time it will end there, if not much sooner. And your desperate attempt to be noticed grinds, as inevitably as ever, to a halt.

Thanks to the aforementioned 'retweet' function on Twitter, your brilliance can be seen by loads of people, people that neither you nor your friends have ever heard of, and thus the bubble of closed-endedness is popped. I once asked David Mitchell a question on Twitter, and he answered it! That would never have happened on Facebook, because if you're famous and on Facebook, the amount of notifications you are likely to get will probably cause your computer to explode. Well, probably not. I'm not a computer technician.

So in conclusion, I will not let Twitter post my updates on Facebook; I like my ability to post something on one website and not the other. Some things I come up with suit Twitter more than Facebook, and vice versa. There is no grey area, as far as I can see; they're unique and different to each other. And taking two bright splashes of creative and distinctly original brilliance and mixing them up into some sort of muddy, bastardised 'Twitface' seems a little unfair.