Meet the new communicators: the Twitterati

"I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room."

- Blaise Pascal

We are sitting at a restaurant counter, sipping wine and chatting, when my friend begins twittering. Not in the usual way. Two women twittering turn no heads. Rather, she is "twittering" via her iPhone, typing a message to subscribers in the quantum universe of blogs, URLs and spheres.

For those who still commune by glance and gesture, "to twitter" roughly means to express an abbreviated thought or observation in real time to a live audience of brain voyeurs. People who want to know your every cogitation and sign up for the privilege.

Shorter than a blog post, a "tweet" is a sentence or two that essentially answers the question: What are you doing?

Often, the answer is not riveting, as in: "Getting ready for work." Other times, twitterers have been put to constructive use, such as reporting possible poll shenanigans.

Under ideal circumstances, a tweet would offer insight or news such as: "Rahm Emanuel just walked in."

As, in fact, he did the evening of my twit-initiation. Instantly, my friend's twitterees - all 5,000 of them - knew what she knew and were as good as there.

In the Information Age: Knowing equals being.

The Facebook generation has been sorta twittering for years, posting prosaic bulletins about their whims and whereabouts, providing a glimpse of what the world would be like if hummingbirds could type: "Jordan is busy busy!"

"Josh is driving to the mountains today."

"Kate is sooooooooo never drinking martinis again."

On Planet Facebook, nothing in one's life is not worth mentioning. I am, therefore I am, therefore I am.

But what are friends for, if not to feign interest in what's not the least bit interesting? Serious twitter subscribers expect more than a mood update, I'm told, and presumably won't stick around long for less. Or will they? I recently created my own account. Nary a tweet have I posted thus far, yet already I have a dozen or so subscribers.

In the spirit of gamesmanship, herewith a tweet: "James Dobson's letter-writing campaign to set me straight re God and GOP appears to be backfiring. Most e-mails from his Web site the past two days disagree with Dobson."

As my son would say, "Baaam!"

Truth be known, I confess to a certain, inexplicable calm. Gratification, if you will. Shoulders relaxing. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is something to this twittering business.

One's every-other-thought couldn't be compelling. But there may be merit. Wouldn't we be interested in Ahmadinejad's twitterings? Barack Obama's? Sarah Palin's?

Come to think of it, how long before we begin to expect, if not demand, that public officials twitter?

The Obama campaign revolutionized political communication and fundraising. Fireside chats and radio addresses may nurture our nostalgia, but blogs and twitters feed our need for speed. They also give an impression of human contact without the muss and fuss of actual intimacy.

For serious twitterers, there is a commercial aspect. Building one's base, so to speak, eventually leads to possible marketing opportunities. When one has a million subscribers to one's thoughts, then one may have a salable asset.

The impulse to stay incessantly in touch can be viewed as gregarious or as a sign of consuming anxiety. Twittering may be the opiate of the obsessively-compulsively disordered. Who needs the couch when no thought is ever repressed? Something to consider. Or, perchance, to tweet?

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group