I tweet, therefore I am...

Above the clicking of the keyboard as I write this, I can hear the excited twitterings of the families of starlings, sparrows and wrens in the garden outside. They were fed this morning, the sun is at least trying to shine, they're happy and less hungry and they're talking about it - all in their different ways, contributing to the birdsong static which seems to have characterised the past few months.

I suppose this is where the idea of Twitter came from. Birds don't sing for our entertainment - they sing, cheep, tweet, twitter to communicate meaning. To assert territory or partner ownership. To comment on events and activities. They are: they tweet; they tweet: they are. In human terms, the mirco-blogging of www.twitter.com is an online forum to give people an opportunity to provide a similar running commentary on their activities, emotions and observations. Once you get hooked on Twitter, it soon becomes impossible to drink a cup of coffee without announcing it - possibly with photographic evidence. Break-ups and engagements have been accomplished through tweets; births and deaths announced. Twitter is how I found out about the deaths of Michael Jackson, Henry Allingham, Harry Patch, how I keep in contact with one or two friends and acquaintances, and how I imagine myself to have encountered new friends... some of whom I don't even know by name.

But is Twitter what it seems? Perhaps for some people, tweeting about something replaces the need to do it. For example the Tweeter who posts that they're going to the gym might, after a while and after a night spent up too late online, tweeting that they couldn't sleep, decide that, oh well... they'd said they were at the gym, so that would just have to do. Virtual toning, virtual calorie-loss would be enough for one day and anyway... if you're doing all your socialising online, what does it matter if you gain a few pounds? No-one's going to see you anyway. You can always turn off the webcam. The tweeter who claims to be up late, drinking, socialising, living wildly, might, for all their readers know, be tweeting from the safety of their bed, cup of cocoa on their bedside table, their iPod resounding with the 'Sounds of Nature' app to help them get to sleep. I wish I travelled by train more, sometimes: one of the highlights of any train journey is the inevitable moment when someone's mobile rings and your journey is punctuated by the inevitable announcement of: 'I'm on the train!' - with extra volume compensating for a breaking signal. In fact it happens everywhere. 'I'm in Starbucks!' 'I'm just in Marks & Spencers...' 'I'm (gasp) on the (pant) treadmill!'

Best of all, in our world of mobile phone announcements of location, is the overheard lie. Picture it. You're in your local cafe. Starbucks, Costa, wherever. You hear the ringtone. The person behind you answers. 'Oh - yeah, pet - I won't be long, I'm just getting into the car now - right now! Yeah... depends on the traffic, but I should be with you in like... say 20 minutes.' As you sip your coffee you notice 15 minutes slip past before he drains his Raspberry Mocha Frappucino and departs...

... and yet, funny though such eavesdropping on the deceptions at the heart of someone else's life may be, they're the very key of the shallowness of online communication. Of my favourite 'direct message status' communicants on Twitter, three or four are people whom I've never met, and am likely never to meet. And it's probably best that way. Certainly for my own part, I'm much more confident, and talkative, on paper or on screen, where I have the opportunity to draft, rethink, and press delete. In person I say much the same thing, but am just a bit more reserved and reticent about it all, mainly because I fear that someone will be offended, or bored, or just not get the joke. I agonise over a comment and end up being a good listener. On Twitter, though, I can do both - and Twitter really is the multitasker's friend. You tweet that you're drinking coffee as you drink it - that you're sad as you put on the Leonard Cohen album - that you're doing the ironing as you put your iPhone or your BlackBerry out of the path of the iron. I've tweeted from the car, the cafe, the bedroom, the hairdresser's chair, the side of the pool... but still I laugh to myself as I visualise an 'actual' gathering of the people to whom I'm talking when I type these tweets. I imagine us all there, sitting on sofas, coffee cups or wineglasses at hand... tweeting to one another in a room where the silence is punctuated only by the click of keys and the chorus of 'new message' tones.

But is this confident chattiness just as much a lie as the man who says he's in the car as he sips his frappucino in Starbucks? The middle-aged man who poses as a teenage girl to lure unsuspecting victims to his web of lies? The politician who claims to be the fun, approachable everyman to get votes, or the musician who feigns chumminess to increase album sales? Do we ever really know who we're tweeting to?

Then again. Is online twittering so different to a conversation face-to-face? A new expression was coined in America within the last year: 'let's schedule some face time'. A phrase which makes me shudder, it indicates people who have time to text or tweet but who find it more difficult to make enough time to meet up. But does 'face time' mean truth? We all wear masks. Cosmetic companies sell products to disguise everything from a good night's sleep to the ageing process. The artifice of our own minds does the rest - we put on the masks of confidence, happiness, the carefree and the brave, when we often feel none of these things for real. We never really know who we're talking to, even if they're sitting so close that we can touch them, with the cards of their technical identity clearly on the table.

The birdsong in my garden and the tweetings of my phone and my computer have characterised this summer. One morning in July, beset by end-of-school-year exhaustion, I posted on Twitter that I was too tired to tweet. This sums it up for me. I had to tweet that I was too tired to tweet, and that's just how Twitter works: if someone who usually tweets every day goes quiet, you wonder if they're sick, or away, or offended. To every action, we're told, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If we want our actions to mean anything, these days, it seems that we have to announce them in order to beckon towards us the affirmation of reaction of a fellow-tweeter somewhere in the world.

As the keystrikes slow and I lose myself in thought once more, I can hear seagulls wheeling high overhead, commenting, I imagine, on a mild, grey, calm seaside afternoon. I'm too tired to tweet, just now, and too tired to tweet that I'm too tired to tweet. But I think I'll keep the mask of twittering a while... because like any human contact, it makes me smile that, as I send my words into the ethereal darkness, someone might smile at an observation, laugh at my expense or, best of all: reply.