I just don't get Twitter

I'd be the first to admit that I'm hardly ahead of the times when it comes to technology and social media and whatnot, but despite having tried several times, I just don't get Twitter.

Following a perusal of the wonderful Amanda Palmer's blog I thought I'd follow a link to a Twitter hashtag #FuckPlanB where people are talking about pursuing their original dreams (plan A) and how they don't want to put any energy into boring jobs (plan B) that may provide some financial benefit but detract from time that could be spent on Plan A.

But as I waded through these tweets, sometimes trying to get more of an idea of a particular person's identity by looking at their other tweets, I found myself experiencing a sensation rather like that of scanning through a radio station, picking up faint snatches of speech; experiencing a disorientating feeling of not having any definite substance to grab onto.

Am I alone in this feeling? The popularity of Twitter suggests that it must be serving some use to people, but whenever I go on there I feel as if I am in a room with a thousand people all talking on their phones to a thousand other people who are somewhere else. All I hear are fragments of one half of a million conversations and I do not see how one could possibly get the whole picture. But perhaps that is not the point; the fragmentation of communication into 140 character units of (almost) sense is perhaps not meant to be anything more than the scattered whispers of a multitudinous machine - full of hashes and retweets but signifying nothing.