I like Twitter.

I like Facebook.

Hell, I like the concept of social networking sites in general, with the exception of MySpace. They are a great way to keep up with the people in your life that you did not really know and do not really see that much, but you can find out where they are now because once upon a time, you used to be friends, or closer, or for those that move away for work and can not visit as often. Some people use it for nefarious purposes, like the one person whom was on the Gap helpdesk line that would search Facebook for names of women whom he thought sounded attractive on the phone. (Yes, that actually happened. No, I am not kidding. Word of advice: make sure your pictures and profiles are set to Friends Only.)

Facebook is a great tool, and so is Twitter. Twitter is an interesting concept: use 140 characters or less to describe whatever you want. It has powered a lot of movement, a lot of press lately, and most journalists who would bash this little slice of web that I call my own would say that Twitter is killing serious journalism – then again, they also say that about blogging, and yet they mostly still have jobs. Tweets generally contain information from the mundane to the groundbreaking, from the general useless spam to the valued updates, from the misinformation to the accurate verified truth.

I consider myself a casual blogger. I am not serious enough with it to start advertising and pull in money, nor start up any type of big writing project, I just write when it strikes my fancy. I write fiction for myself, fiction with friends as part of a few writing groups I’m a part of, simulation role-playing writing (yeah, those that can call me a nerd can do so now), the odd but occasional short story for here, poems, you name it. One thing I’ve noticed, though, ever since I started using Twitter…

I do not want to write anymore.

Years ago, I used to be able to write a five page short story without batting an eyelash. I used to have Word documents on my computer full of stories that were novels, poems, short stories, creations, drafts… I have also written a few blogs before – this is in fact my fourth attempt at keeping a regular blog: two on Internet forums, one on a separate blogging system that shut down. But try as I might, now that Twitter has got me seeing people like Brent Spiner writing stories through his Twitter page, or Ryan Sohmer’s epic-ness using his words on Twitter… it is becoming harder and harder now.

If I could do something like this for the rest of my life – maybe even be a columnist for a local newspaper or something – I can honestly say I would be happy. But I think I now know why journalists do not like Twitter that much, because I may be experiencing a little bit of it: I am losing that little bit of me, the little kid inside of me whom just has all these words floating around inside his head for some reason in a story that makes sense to him and he wants to share it.

Why carefully research a subject when a mass of people will just post us hearsay anyway?

Why write an eloquent article about something close to the heart when an A-list celebrity writes about the dream they had last night on their Blackberry and has 2.3 million followers? (FYI, the most any one of the people I follow has for followers is the aforementioned Brent Spiner, who has 1.1 million. Next in line is Jeph Jacques, writer/artist of Questionable Content with under 30000 followers.)

Why write an in-depth analysis of the swine flu pandemic with truthful facts when people will just go and listen to whatever tweets are trending at the moment?

I see their frustration, and I do sympathize with it.

What’s worse is that Facebook is trying to be like Twitter. This new “put an @ in front of a name and there’ll be a link to their name” thing, I swear, I’ve seen it used in status updates from my friends list… exactly three times. Nice update, Facebook, even being a direct rip-off of Twitter – though, on the flip side, it is probably because they’re trying to win over Twitter users and that is one way of doing it. MySpace even announced a syncing service with Twitter, so you can update status messages from Twitter and vice versa. There’s a long-standing application on Facebook that will do something similar.

The question I have is: Has modern writing devolved into anything that can fit into 140 characters or less? 160?

I would like to think not. I also would like to think that everywhere where this blog gets doled out to, people read it and they have their opinions, and they take something from it and they want to comment about it or how I am wrong and my haircut really hides the Devil horns, they do so. So far, that has proven to be false, so maybe I am wrong. I can admit that.

I really hope, though, that people use status updates on social networking sites responsibly. Facebook, I expect it to be about personal stuff, true, and to a certain extent, I would expect Twitter to as well. Just please do not kill that which I love in the process: the art of the written word.