Why We Occupy the Twitter

I only came to the Twitter Machine recently, as in like the last few months. And I remember when I started hearing a lot about Twitter; I thought, wow, how obnoxious. Seriously, people writing, ever so briefly, about their every move?

But now that I'm delving deeper, I get it. With Twitter you can reach out beyond your physical space and find others of like mind, fellow travelers, if you will. You hashtag your interests and voila, you make new friends. And you read a lot of really funny stuff.

Like the short story is a far more difficult medium than the novel (in my opinion), you can challenge yourself to be witty, charming, and factually relevant in 140 characters or less. You can "get in, make your Z, and get out" as Zorro would have it.

Then there's the cachet of rubbing virtual elbows with greatness. Like last night. I was so, so stoked when @CharlesMBlow tweeted to me, directly. I'd given him a little creative idea with which to handle a situation and he was nice enough to reply and compliment me. That was cool.

And like the day, several months back, when President Obama's Colorado campaign office began following me. I'm not ashamed to say that I took a picture of that page of my account. Man, I'm a wonk!

All of the positive upheaval in the world these days is fed on a steady appetite of social media, mainly Twitter. It has become the scout who goes ahead of the foot soldiers for news and the Pony Express of a new revolution. We're typing away at our modern printing presses and rushing them out to the public. We're lighting our lanterns, hopping on our computer horses, and heading out into the dark night of a civilization agitated. The Occupy Movement is the latest benefactor of our connectedness.

Those of us on a certain segment of the political spectrum are pouring a lot of our frustrations and a lot of our solutions into this movement through Twitter. And that's a good thing.

That's DEMOCRACY!