Friendships shorter than a Tweet

There is the good old saying that 'Facebook is for the friends you hate and Twitter is for the friends you don't know'. I suppose this is true as a very limited number of my followers I actually know in real life and in fact have never met someone in real life who I previously knew from Twitter. Personally, I am not a big fan of having my friends on my Twitter because I usually want to bitch about them, mainly people who I live with or dick heads who appear on my News Feed on Facebook, but as more and more people I know start to follow me this becomes more and more difficult. My life just gets too stressful when I do not have a means to vent my anger at people who neither know what I am talking about or probably even care.

However in saying this, you do get the odd person on Twitter who does care, first of all you start '@replying' them, then over a space of time it moves onto 'Direct Messaging' and will then usually end up in adding them on Facebook, Skype or MSN. It is these Tweeters which bring me back to Twitter time and time again. It is these few people who make me check my Replies or who make me read my timeline rather than just post a tweet and leave. It is these people who make me enjoy my time on Twitter. Sadly most of these eventually drift away and you lose touch with them and in some cases don't speak to them for months on end.

Sometimes I forget that people on Twitter actually have social lives, you know, real friends, work, school or just in general an actual life outside of Twitter. I don't know I am just getting sick of having friendships on Twitter which are shorter than a Tweet it self. Twitter has moved from being for the 'friends you don't know' to a bunch of people who 'used to be friends but no longer remember you'. Do not get me wrong, I have fallen to the social awkwardness of 'I can't remember telling you that' before, but it seems to happen to me a lot more than me forgetting the person.

Although I was talking to my friend about this today, I seem to remember stuff more than other people. I will be talking to someone and more often than not they will say 'I can't remember telling you that' or something to that effect. I guess the fact that I remember some things that others don't upsets me, it just makes me feel that they have made a bigger impact in my life than I have in their's. I suppose that his just shows a Human Nature of wanting to be recognised and noticed in life.

Everyone who has ever posted a Facebook status, tweeted, logged into Foursquare or wrote a blog is attention seeking. Everyone, myself included, is looking for a response from someone, we all just want some reignition in this world filled with celebrities and fame. What is stopping us from achieving this? The only way a 'normal' person can get themselves out their is from the ever growing forum that is the internet. Singers, writers, comedians are constantly found on on YouTube and the likes, look at Britain's Got Talent and X Factor they have even started taking auditions from YouTube.

Because of this we are haunted by the fear of not being noticed. Why am I not getting views on my YouTube video? Why has nobody liked my Facebook status? Why did nobody retweet that? That is not a way I want to live my life, with the constant self doubt of not being cared about or not being as popular or as funny as someone else. Why should I have to live like that? I am decent enough guy, I have good friends, I have plenty of enemies, but everyone does. I want to be able to come online and write blogs or tweet because I want to, not to please someone else. I just hope one day I can 100% tell myself that this is true. Can you?

What has the internet turned us into? We have shorter attention spans, adverts on TV have had to be shortened, to give us more variety and more concise information for a market who want's choice and lots of it. If we condense our life into 140 characters, where does that leave us? We get bored of friendships that arn't going anywhere, we need that constant attention from someone. And relationships? They have become even worse, we can't settle down, we need drama, we can no longer allow our lives to be boring. Why should we settle for a life where everything is always the same when we can go online and find millions of different things to entertain us?

I am in no way going to deny that any of this applies to me, because most of it does. Nor am I saying that any of this is right, I do not like my life being like this but sometimes I just feel like I am trapped in a vicious circle. Obviously this is not the way anyone should lead their life but all of us will do it in some way or other whether it have a huge effect or just small one.