TWITTER QUITTER
J-Zone joined Twitter over the summer after a year of resistance and peer pressure. Its been a joke, as expected. Chances are somebody you respect and admire will show their ass by saying something corny. You’ll eventually wish them death by shark attack after they flood the news feed with garbage day in and day out. Read a book instead. Or…maybe its not REALLY that bad? Either way, Zone needs your feedback…If anybody actually read this due to a "tweet" , please state it in the comments section. Zone is debating on deleting his account and your input will determine whether he cans or keeps it. Votes will be tallied in a week or so. Thanks for the support.
When I signed up for Twitter on August 10th, I felt like I boned a distant cousin. I was skeptical from the jump. The other day, I got an e-mail from a homie I hadn’t spoken to in awhile. I open the e-mail and what do I see? No “what’s good?”, no “how’s life?”, no “how’s your grandmother?”…just “I’m on Twitter, follow me son”. I hop on and I see…
“RT- I’m eating a taco for lunch, OMG, LMAO, ROTFL, SMH”.
Are you serious? I sincerely hope that after you tweet that, you finish that taco and get some rare incurable form of food poisoning. If you’re “tweeting” to “promote” or do “business”, you’d better throw in a few hundred meaningless “tweets” a day to stay on top of the feed or you won’t even be seen. I hate the fact that I was cornered into Twitter for the sake of "promotion", but it seemed like I had no choice. I felt like I was marched into an emo-rock show to run the merch table at gun point. I could barely upload a profile pic, post anything, follow anybody…it would freeze/ time out EVERY SINGLE TIME. So in an angry fit of rage on a seasonable fall day in Queens, I’m ready to smash my account. The same way Sal smashed Radio Raheem’s boom box on a hot summer day in Brooklyn. I mean, my account is still active, but I barely bother. I’ve given up on that garbage outside of the random alert post whenever an article goes up on here. Figuratively, I’ve already smashed the notion that I could hop onto the Tweetmobile. That aside, here are some of the more reasons -both ignorant and sensible- why I don’t like Twitter…
- THE NAME
It just sounds bad. Twitter sounds more like a verb describing what you to do to your balls with a remote in the other hand while you’re watching Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball than yet another social networking site. Not to mention, an individual post is called…a “tweet”? Ummm, yeah. Thus, my user name is jzonedonttweet. Why? Because grown men don’t…“tweet”…we post shit we think you should know…or at least that’s what we should be doing.
- THE LOGO
Seems shallow but…that fuckin little bird. I hate him. I wanna put him on the Foreman grill and douse him with some of Masta Ace’s Hennessy based BBQ sauce -ask around, Ace is the Black Dom Deloise. The little “Tweet” Tweety bird gets on my nerves every time I see him. He symbolizes the meaningless chirping and clucking that people do on there. Make that little bitch ass bird into a baby mink stole or something.
- THE FURTHER DETERIORATION OF HUMAN INTERACTION, INTELLIGENCE AND SOCIAL SKILL
The purpose of Twitter is to keep your thoughts short and sweet. Thus, you get 140 characters to say what is 9 times out of 10 something arbitrary. We also get a whole bunch of “LOL”, “LMFAO”, “OMG”, “SMH”, “ROTFL”, etc. just to fit this odorless brain fart into the allotted 140 spaces. I’m just wondering how long it will be before people actually start talking in acronyms like that. You know, like they’ll actually say "ROTFL,SMH,OMG,LMFAO!" with a straight face instead of actually rollin on the floor laughin their fuckin ass off and shakin their head, like ‘Oh My God’! I got news folks, the day has already come. My homie told me about a young lady that did this to him out on the night scene once, and I thought he was fibbing. No. I stopped by an event recently to say what’s up to somebody, and low and behold I see a cute 20 something year old broad worth a 10 minute collision. I wasn’t expecting much intellect from the tramp when she was telling me a story, but when she said “It was hilarious, I was ROTFL” and didn’t show a dust mite of laughter on her face, it caused my halfway stiff hard-on to rescind it’s letter of intent. Sounds drastic right? Wrong. Even for a one night thrill, a broad like that ain’t worth the rubber. Yes, I’ve gotten that shallow and impatient in my old age. I guarantee you that dumb bitch is on Twitter all day.
Watching Kelly Bundy be an airhead bimbo on Married With Children 20 years ago, who could’ve foreshadowed that people would fall right into that IQ range with the advent of the internet, a place that has the potential to do just the opposite with the wealth of information that‘s out there. If I wanna smash a robot, I’ve got Rosie from the Jetsons on speed dial. Internet language is catapulting people to Lenny from Of Mice & Men levels of dumbness, and its atrocious. GTFOHWTB,YC…That means get the fuck outta here with that bullshit, you’re corny.
- HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
The predecessor to Twitter (besides Facebook) was myspace. Yeah, in 2004 it was all the craze. But I had a website then, and didn’t see the point. Shit, I thought myspace was a dating site at first to be honest, so when dudes at shows would say “I added you on myspace”, I would back up 50 feet in 0.5 seconds. I even dissed it on a song, and swore I wouldn’t cave in. I eventually found out it was an all-in-one promotional tool, and there were 4 fake J-Zone pages up there, some of which still exist. (Note: Why somebody would want to impersonate bum ass me has me befuddled, be Pharrell or somebody big time that women dig so you can entertain an unsuspecting college bitch). Anyway, I caved in, and myspace wound up being very useful, especially since my website wasn‘t user friendly and was a pain in the ass to update. But of course over time, people turned myspace into a SPAM-infested “look at me” congregation, where they would post 25 status updates a day just to stay at the top of the feed or e-mail established artists and ask for free services. (Note: What if I go into McDonald’s and ask for a free Filet-O-Fish “for the love of hip-hop”? Fuckouttahere). Fools would also respond to a mood update about being in a car accident with “Check out my new album on itunes now!!“ and sit up there and comment on Tila Tequila’s pictures and tell her how beautiful she was. C’mon, like that bitch was really gonna fly to the middle of Kansas to give your modem loving ass some pussy. She had 10,212 comments on each photo, all from grown ass men that would hurl compliments at her like they were en route to getting some ass. It was a puke-inducing sight. Needless to say, all of the above killed what was once a very useful site for artists and entertainers. Like anything else, Twitter replaced it, but we’re in 2009, which means overkill will push it to joke status, and it already has. It will soon be replaced by Twatter, a cousin of Twitter that only allows 20 characters. Don’t worry, you can still put ROTFL,SMH,OMG,LMFAO! as your status update, there‘s just enough character spaces (damn, but you can’t even add spaces after the commas).
- FINAL THOUGHTS
I’ve learned to accept that promotion is my Achille’s Heel. If it’s really all about overkill and not what you’re actually doing, maybe just doing what you enjoy and letting it be discovered by whoever does is alright. You won‘t make a fuckin dime that way, but at least you know where you stand and don‘t get frustrated by 30 different people telling you a Twitter account will help you. Sometimes, you to say to yourself, “at what point do I stop trying to out-hustle the out-hustlers and just enjoy what I do, success or fail”? Trying to convince people that they should look at what you do amongst all the other crap they’re bombarded with takes the fun out of what you do in the first place. I still can’t figure out how to put a hit counter on this God damn thing, but it never even crossed my mind until people asked me about “hits”. I just like to argue and talk a lot of shit because I’m getting older and more evil every day, and if I couldn‘t assail everything that annoys me -and celebrate my unpopular opinions- in word form I might walk into a 7-11 and blow the whole place up for a Klondike Bar. I don’t know what’s worse, being irrelevant or seeing no limits in attempts to stay relevant. Do I need to link an update to “I just caught this crazy STD fuckin some bitch from The Biggest Loser” for it to be seen?
That said, here I am. I joined a site that I swore over my dead body I’d never join. Mainly to "promote" these articles and the random beat or DJ gig I do, but does it really matter at this point? Everybody’s on Twitter, everybody is following everybody, who really gives a fuck? Truthfully, I’m considering getting on some 227 shit, where I’m only reachable when you pass by my front stoop and catch me chillin there. If Tweeting all day is what it takes to stay relevant in 2009, then the random music I do and this blog will stay a hobby/occasional source of $$ that friends and whoever stumbles across them can check out. Sounds like a cop out, but fuck it, I’m out of patience and am finished with "promoting" to pay my bills. I’m outta here, I gotta go find a fuuuuuuuckin job in a recession after being my own boss for 10 years. Twitter me a job application.
September 17th, 2009 at 6:56 am
I found this shit on Twitter.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:09 am
Caught this via Twitter, but I check your blog on the regular. However, I initially found out about your blog via Twitter.
I’m probably a poor example though, I didn’t know anything about you until I heard Captain Back$lap on the Bitchwhippaz joints and then I searched out all your shit. Scooped up your music, subscribed to the Gator$ N Fur$, read your high school ball articles; a regular fan boy.
Anyway, I clowned Twitter for a while but now I’m into it. I hate Facebook. To me, Twitter is just texting my friends. So I try and only post goofy shit that I think will get a laugh.
It’s cool to get some sort of access to the people you dig in music, sports or whatever. But a lot of them abuse it. My favorite DJ, J-Rocc, just pours those shits out so I had to stop following him. Or boxer Andre Berto defending Chris Brown: unfollow.
For the most part I follow news sources for my sports teams, people who try to say funny shit with it, and, I can’t front, dimes that post half naked photos of themselves on the regular.
Zone you don’t like text messaging either I thought, so twitter definitely ain’t your thing. I think you could throw out some entertaining ass “tweets” from time to time, but you’re a writer dude. You’re not about to limit your thoughts to 140. I respect that
September 17th, 2009 at 7:29 am
@ Kiya…Haha, you’re the one that pressured me into this with yo Tweety Bird Tweetin Azzz. That’s no surprise.
@ big party…thanks. I hear you on Facebook though, I’m on that more than twitter, but as I wrote before, facebook is gettin out of control. It will happen to every site eventually, until people move on to the next one and do the same shit. But I really do hate text messaging with a passion unless its direct, so all this shit is useless to me.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:40 am
I found your article because of twitter too. It was because of dante ross twitter account though. I enjoy twitter, but mostly for the things that other people say. I like seeing which people are actually smart, and who is a complete idiot.
I also like twitter because some people do post things with some sort of substance, like you posting about you’re articles. Its also not as cluttered with people trying to get you to listen to their new song.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:47 am
I caught this via Twitter. I can’t really argue with anything you say about it (yeah, it’s lame, and Facebook is just as bad, if not worse), but I’ve found it useful enough to justify not shit-canning it — I keep up with friends I don’t see as much I’d like to, follow people / organizations that post news and info about stuff I’m interested in, musicians / artists I like, etc. But that shit has to be managed, too many people out there post too much bullshit. Anyway, I’m a fan, so I’d still keep up on your blog and music if you weren’t on Twitter, but it just makes it easier to stay up on that stuff. All good either way.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:49 am
OK cool. I’m seeing some positive feedback on it, so maybe it is of some benefit? Check it out, if you think its worth keeping open (or think its pointless and I should dead it) leave a comment. I’ll tally up the votes after a week or so. I’ll probably wind up keepin it anyway, it can’t hurt to keep it functional I guess…but curious to see what people think, since i under-utilize twitter anyway. thanks…
September 17th, 2009 at 7:58 am
KEEP TWITTER lol - its a love and hate companion
I think it will help get ur blog out there more than not..u knew i was gonna say that
I got ur back on the RT’s son haaa
TZZZZ
September 17th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Damn I can’t fix typos here, sorry. Forget that last one.
“Twittering is something you do with your balls in one hand and the remote in the other.” - J-Zone
September 17th, 2009 at 8:32 am
You should keep it and just post something when you got a gig or a blog or something out. Maybe check it once a week to see if anybody you care about hits you up. (Like when I lost my phone, I was able to get a few numbers back this way).
Pete Rock barely ever tweets, but when he does that dude cracks my shit up.
September 17th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Yo waddup Zone?? I’m not feeling twitter either! I hate the terminology, but it’s just another form of networking. That’s how I look at it. I’ve finally become a little more consistent with using & updating it. Gotta do, what we gotta do son! Holla…
September 17th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Stick witcha instincts kid, your reasons nailed it completely in that last paragraph. If something other than the outcome of your creations leads you to disliking the art itself, then stay away from that other altogether.
Back in the days we rolled with a home phone number… then we upgraded to a pager and a business card (maybe) …now cats is runnin around with multiple cell phones, a blackberry, laptop, blog, myspace, facebook and a twitter account. One of my homies was telling me how exhausted he gets from posting and he doesn’t really post that much on his blog. It’s the extra tweetin, text-messaging and web social networking that’s wearing him out.
I don’t use Twitter because, it’s more than i can handle in a day’s time. Plus, I’m not feeling the short-sentenced lingo either. It’s some new-cool that I just don’t get. I use FB as my cell phone, email for sending/receiving files and home phone for my people. I’m currently working on a blog-site and that’ll be my business card. Trash that Twitter account homie, it’s insulting your intelligence.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:33 am
“GTFOHWTB,YC” — Nice. I see you’re catching on to the whole “abbreviation” thing.
I still refuse to make a Twitter account. I don’t understand the concept of being concise, so I have no desire to even attempt abbreviating my thoughts. Might as well keep it though, because you’ll be berated by the general public if you take it down. Maybe it will come in handy one day.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:00 am
That last post about facebook led me to think these pages (facebook, twitter) are such a perversion. Human relationships are ALWAYS meant to have an end. There’s no motherfuckin’ need to keep in touch with EVERYBODY you have met in your life. Most times it’s disappointing.
But anyway, the success of these networking bullshit is our burden: we all need to feed our ego because we’re just a bunch of selfish motherfuckers. The only thing we can do is analyze our contacts and just keep the ones that can be interesting to us. Now if you want to promote yourself, man you gon’ suffer and swallow tons of bullshit.
So my conclusion is: I can’t suggest you shit ’cause you won’t quit it anyway and I wont either, fuck it.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:20 am
eventually there will be a more mature twitter with a better name. twitter is like myspace. I do like to know what goes on in the heads of artists I support. myspace is place for teens and they even have pop ups. the only thing its good for is to hear a sample of new music. hope to hear you rap and perform again. your albums are worth buying. wouldn’t know about these articles if it wasn’t for twitter.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Yo Zone. I feel ya homie. Twitter is some dumb shit. But, Dante tweets like a mofo, and I’m always checkin’ his new blog posts thru his tweets. It’s like a pertinent RSS feed for people you fucks with to stay on top of their shit. So it can be useful sometimes.
September 17th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Twitter is kinda like alcohol, if you’re an idiot, it’s gonna come out. Bad.
Honestly, I love everything you write so I’d rather read your tweets ( sorry) than questlove namedropping and talking about business class all day.
September 17th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
not gonna lie, i caught it on twitter. honestly, there’s worse things out there. yeah people have shitty attention spans and yeah this social network bullshit is more fickle and phony than the broad’s number i got at the bar last night. but it woulda taken me an extra 5 minutes to realize you wrote a new article by visiting your site instead of getting it on the twitter feed. with the speed that things move today, I just cant waste that 5 minutes brother.
blog is comedy and filled with raw truth like Confucius translated the book of Plato and crammed that shit into a fortune cookie.
This shit right here, really resonates:
Sometimes, you to say to yourself, “at what point do I stop trying to out-hustle the out-hustlers and just enjoy what I do, success or fail”? Trying to convince people that they should look at what you do amongst all the other crap they’re bombarded with takes the fun out of what you do in the first place.
keep writing j-zone, shit keeps me sane at work yo.
peace.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Fuck Twitter.
September 17th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Ha! I didn’t even know you gave in and got a twitter account. I’ll be sure to “follow” you.
I finally signed on to twitter after being pressured to do so too. I’m not 100% comfortable with it yet. I haven’t gotten the hang of the RT’s and , and all that garbage yet. But I like it. It’s just another way for me to spread the word about my radio show and send downloads of past shows. I don’t have time to be on it that much so I just link my “tweets” (I HATE that term too) to my facebook to knock out 2 birds with one stone.
I think you should keep it. It can’t hurt. But I agree with bigpartymaker. You usually have alot on your mind (that’s VERY entertaining by the way) so good luck containing yourself to 140 characters!
September 17th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
“I haven’t gotten the hang of the RT’s, less, & greater signs”…
September 17th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Yeah, it’s me. You know how I feel about this, and I wonder how many folks found this article from reading your twitter page or someone else spreading the link? Now that work is back in full scale mode, I check facebook once per evening and that’s it. There’s no time during the day to check it, nor do I have much of a paining to do so. I’m starting to hide more and more folks who consistently clutter up the feed with nonsense.
September 17th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
I saw this by checking your blog, but now i’m following you, haha. pause.
I’ve never had a facebook or myspace and i refuse to. i have nothing to promote and if you don’t have my number or my email i probably dont want to talk to you.
However, i started my twitter (SMH) this past summer just to follow news stories, some bands im interested in, and sports. I started getting the hang of it, got used to it and now like it. My boys rip me, but they will probably have them soon, haha. I never have twatted anything except a DM to slick rick asking him info about his show. Its a good way to contact people you wouldn’t normally get a hold of.
the only problem i have with it is if you’re not constantly checking it that shit piles up. i can go for a day or two and not check it and next thing you know bam, 223 twits waiting to be read.
Like every new social technology i was initially slow to get the hang of it, texting, email etc. but i think this twit shit will eventually catch on
September 17th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Word, thanks to all of y’all that support the blog, I definitely appreciate it. From the looks of it, I think I may as well just keep the account since its already active. I’ll just use it as needed (in 2009 that means under-utilize it), but that’s better than nothing at all, it cant hurt, that’s for sure. Thanks for the input yall…
September 18th, 2009 at 8:10 am
hahah — always on point —gotta love it
September 20th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
nice article J.I understand what you are saying but you can take twitter less seriously.”iz bullshit”
September 20th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I DIDNT check this cuz of twitter, I dont have twitter, and to be honest I dont even really know exactly what twitter is and how it works. To me it’s like a facebook status update on your phone..or something.
ie: “i just took a dump” ” washing my hands now” “omg kanye” “@ the mall” etc etc etc.
i dont give a fuck!!!
i have never twatted and will never tweet
September 20th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Yo Zone I seen your post on twitter, but I’ve been checking the blog out for a little while now.
Twitter is cool, but I use it to really just communicate with my friends. I found all the different Emcee’s I listen to on there and started following them as well. Good to know when new music is dropping. Or if they are coming down to where I live so I can check the show. Some of the shit is entertaining, but majority of it is some non important shit going on in peoples day to day.
Your article was dope I’ll keep reading what you be writing about.
September 21st, 2009 at 7:47 am
Cancelled my myspace account and never got facebook and absolutley refuse to tweet….never do what the clones do.
September 21st, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Back in the early 2000s i used to laugh at rappers like Copywrite and Esoteric beefing on the ‘net and pontificated that you’d never catch a real rapper like Nore participating in such faggotry.
Fast foward to 2009 and you’ve got Nore indulging in a Twitter beef with, of all people, Perez fucking Hilton. Shit is both surreal and sad.
Myspace wasn’t completely worthless as it was a good tool for hearing music and i hooked up with a couple of chicks for casual sex via it, but Facebook and Twitter are completely unnecessary.
September 21st, 2009 at 3:49 pm
MF, I agree. I used to say if anybody had serious “when i see you im stealing on you” beef, they wouldnt advertise it to the net. When they saw you, theyd just handle it then. Real beef moves in silence. But cyber-beef is surreal and sad. I will say that Facebook isn’t completely unnecessary, because its cool to see how old friends are doing. But at the same time, people are in your past for a reason, so after the initial “whats up how u been?”, theres nothing further to say. Myspace I liked better than all of them once I realized how to use it right, but unfortunately it died out. Twitter is unnecessary because of how its used, but we’re in 2009, what isnt done via over kill today anyway?
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:31 am
Zone, forget that tweeter stuff and the bird is annoying. I know about your blog and follow it from the email you sent and that’s cool with me because is not a constant bombardment. I have a facebook page that I’ve had for about 8 months. I check it once a day at night just to see if anything is going down since I use it to follow some folks back home in Puerto Rico and as a reminder place holder of sorts since I have a horrible memory.
I don’t know how you got it set up but why not have a facebook that for Fans so you post your gigs, articles etc. and then your personal one for your friends and family and whatever you feel like. you can always point folks to the facebook fan page.
Greetings from Philly.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:05 am
I find when having similar convos w/others that most forget that sites such as MySpace/Facebook/Twitter are called social NETWORKING sites that some abuse in the vein of promotion. The term “networking” involves more than 1 person interacting, not “me me me” as we tend to clearly see in our feed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all well and good to blast/RT/LOL what you’re up to but let us not forget to be human to one another & keep our social graces via these technological vehicles - they don’t use us, WE use THEM. That’s our responsibility. And don’t forget free will - if you find someone irritating, “unfollow”…
If the tool doesn’t work for you, f it - I’ll still read your blog (which I orig found via Twitter).
September 25th, 2009 at 4:55 am
I caught this shit on myspace, man I don’t know.. Myspace was really good back in the days when people didn’t add you cause they want you to hear their music and all that shit.. As for twitter, I joined because I heard Charles Hamilton promoting it so much he even made a track called “Twitter Me Baby” so I said fuck it, let’s make an account, but I only used it for like 10 - 15 minutes that shit is ridiculous.. Facebook is ok if it didn’t have all those fuckin games people play which I don’t, so I don’t care, and I don’t know why all those application invites, if I wanted to play mafia wars or FarmVille I would’ve done so using the first invite, I don’t need like a 1000 or anything.. And I also hate those quizzes they have on facebook like “How much do you know me?” do you even care how much I know you? I don’t care how much people know me, it’s cool enough to go to a club or a bar and get fucked up together, it’s peace like that you don’t need to know “What’s the first thing I’d take out with me if my house caught on fire” now do you?
September 25th, 2009 at 5:56 am
Zone, i dont feel alone anymore..
FOLLOW DEEZ NUTS ON TWITTER!!! like like
someone shut it down, Facebook to please
October 8th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
what up zone… i feel you… really… but i was made aware of this via twitter… i cannot knock the speed at which info/news travels via twitter.
October 15th, 2009 at 3:18 am
Your opinions on twit, nitwit-slash-marketing guru- mr. K. West, and going out at night in a world of materialistic maniacs are largely the same as mine. Most people seemingly will disagree (I heard a friend of mine talking about the supposed talent of lady gaga -muhahahahahahahahahaha- ).
But still reading something that makes sense on the internet is fine for a change. Next thing you’ll know people will award some president who maintains at least two wars the peace prize. No one could possibly imagine a thing like that (?)!
So I’m considering fleeing my city to go live in a bat cave in some deserted part of siberia….
Anyway, great blog.
Same goes for the albums.Pimps don’t Pay Taxes, Madre & the Chinchilla project especially.
Peace!