Wendyl Nissen: I am so over Twitter

I am so over Twitter, and I only discovered it a few weeks ago. I was watching The Daily Show when host Jon Stewart mentioned that someone had "tweeted". I turned to my husband and innocently asked: "What's a tweet?" to which he replied "It's like texting but for people who go on a bit".

Before I knew it, I was part of a worldwide techno trend which involves sending messages of up to 140 characters into the internet prompted by the question: "What are you doing?" Someone, somewhere might be interested in the fact that I just stirred my apple cider mix and would be bottling it today; that I just found three eggs, not in the hen coop but around the side of the house in the bushes; or that I just put the electric blanket back on the bed (brrrr).

Like most social networking sites, within seconds I was told of people on my email contacts list who also Twittered. One was a confused colleague whose tweets petered out with a sign-off in December which said "not quite understanding the Twitter concept".

This after twittering "drinking a cocktail I concocted - fresh raspberries and gin and tonic whooshed in the blender".

Another colleague regularly tweets about everything from eating Easter eggs, drinking champagne, blow-drying her hair and moving to Sydney.

And then it started. I turned on my computer every day to find that I had entered a stalker's paradise where random people I have never met announce that they are "following" me.

Which tells me they are interested in how many Easter eggs I can eat. Which is a serious worry.

A similar thing happened on Facebook, when I would find myself reading personal messages from complete strangers and I couldn't get off Facebook fast enough. The problem remains that they won't let me. I am stuck in Facebook forever. Maybe I am stuck in Twitter also.

One thing I do know is that I am trapped in a tragic case of life imitating art. Sixty years after George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, millions of people are voluntarily signing up to be watched over by an accessible, design-perfect, slang-using version of Big Brother.

In fiction he probed into the most personal details of people's lives, violating their rights to privacy using telescreens as part of a totalitarian state.

Twenty-five years on Twitterers are laying open their lives to random stalkers, cyber spies and marketers keen to know what brand of Easter egg they are eating and what type of champagne they are quaffing.

But Twitter fans claim that it's all just a bit of harmless fun. It's like a cocktail party and the secret is making sure you're at the right cocktail party. Others simply like indulging in internet-enabled narcissism for the price of 140 dull characters.

And that would be Newspeak, Nineteen Eight-Four's fictional language whose vocabulary gets smaller every day. As one character Syme says, shortly before being vaporised: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

How better to reform the English language than to encourage its users to limit their writing to 140 characters? Not a lot of room for beautiful words like perspicacious, ephemeral or quintessence. On Twitter the most commonly used words appear to be yahoo, yeah and yo.

To date I haven't written one Twitter which I suppose makes me a twat.

I've followed a few people and have come to the conclusion that I'd be better off reading a book. And so after a few short weeks I went to cancel my membership. And there he was. The man for whom I would forsake all claims to fidelity and marriage, for whom I would finish my novel, lose weight and stop drinking, Dr Drew, the host of Celebrity Rehab.

"Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain. John Locke" he tweeted.

"A person without a sense of humour is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road. Henry Ward Beecher."

My Twitter remains active. I'm Dr Drew's 274,834th follower.