Doug Bowman on Leaving Twitter:
Small moments on Twitter are fascinating, because they reveal tiny bits about the people who share them, and in aggregate, reveal entire patterns of human behavior and emotion. Whether it’s the mundane update about what someone had for breakfast, or that they’re late for school, or that they had toilet paper stuck to their shoe for an hour before a friend pointed it out… Those small moments are real, humanizing, and pings to the world that a person is alive, is functioning, and is a normal human being.
and
I love how people can gain a new voice with Twitter. It has given me a louder and farther-reaching voice than I ever thought possible. And while I can only physically be in one place at one time, I love how Twitter distributes my awareness of what’s going on nearby or far away. At any moment, I can instantly know what’s going on in the next room, in the next town, or in a country halfway around the world.
Even though I’m no longer a user of Twitter, these two statements are perfect. Like so many other micro-celebrities now and then, we were real people just like everyone else and while our accomplishments day-to-day as people were small, the distribution of the mundane turned us into a real-life Truman show. It’s easy for me to talk about how I did that with books and blog posts and how-to guides on getting followers and retweets but, at the end of the day, it was the posts about the mundane with a commitment to transparency that brought me 4K followers.
Many of us used Twitter to change our world. While a tweet about my breakfast isn’t big news, the capturing and sharing of my day with thousands of people did have an affect.