Time-Suck

card courtesy of someecards

There was a good Doonesbury cartoon by Garry Trudeau in Saturday's Guardian. Mike is asking his girlfriend to explain the appeal of Twitter. Her bubble says:

'It's just a simple oversharing tool.. It's like a frisbee - harmless interactive fun. It has its practical use. But I predict most people will come to realise it's a banal time-suck and move on.'

Two excellent expressions there: 'time-suck' (what's happening to you right now as you read this) and 'oversharing'. That appears to describe the redundancy of communicating the minutiae of daily and emotional life to other people. Like when you bump into somebody you know in the street and ask how they are, only wanting to know if they're still alive basically, if that. When you get hit with a mind-numbing saga of the telephone engineer not turning up, the wait for the bus and their issues with the HR director at work, isn't that what's known as 'twittering on'?

I got the best advice once on a creative writing course. I don't know who said it, but the gist was 'The world doesn't need another description from me.' Sorry? But when you think about it, I guess it really means 'Don't state the flaming obvious.' Enough said. For now.