I'm atwitter

On the drive back from Ottawa last Sunday I tuned in to Spark, a radio show about technology. It's probably the only reason I know about Youtube, Blogger and ebay. On this particular show Nora Young, the host, interviewed some young tweeter snapper, who spoke at length (considerably more than 140 characters) about the benefits of Twitter. One such benefit is that it can, apparently, make people more creative. It does this, he said, by exposing us to other people's views. Humans being human, we tend to hang out with people whose opinions are very similar to ours and there is, apparently, research that shows that exposure to contrary views can make us more creative beings. I'm not exactly sure how it does this, but perhaps it causes neurotransmitters to fire in an area of the brain where they would ordinarily be sluggish--that part of the brain, for example, that thinks Sarah Palin would make a good president or that thongs are attractive. The person interviewed suggested that everyone randomly select someone to follow on Twitter in order to become more creative.

This sounded kind of interesting, so today I joined Twitter. I'm not going to write anything on there but I already have a disciple. This could go to my head. My follower is someone named RighteousSword, with a bit of explanation underneath in case the name is too subtle: "HQ for Christian Soldiers".

To randomly select someone to follow I decided to type "Seamus" in the Twitter search engine and pick whoever was 7th on the list. It was Steve Johnson ("MrMoxy"), a small business growth specialist. A good sign: I have no interest in small business growth. His latest tweet is, "Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. - Seamus Heaney." I checked some of his other tweets. A bad sign: he seems to use his space mainly to quote others. It figures that I would find, in my search to become more creative, someone so uncreative he can't even write his own 140 characters.

It may take some creativity to discover how this exercise is going to make me more creative but I have faith; maybe RighteousSword and I do have something in common.