Canada - Fewer Twits Per Square Mile

Hey, Yanks, don't go calling Canadians a bunch of twits. You know not of what you speak.

There are times I think I spend too much time on the computer. I spend considerable time on this blog, at HumorBloggers.com and reading the blogs of friends and cyber-colleagues as well as managing my Facebook page, listening to blip.fm, watching You Tube videos, sending and receiving e-mails, and sending and receiving "tweets" or Twittering.

Now I find Twitter kind of cool. You can follow colleagues, sports figues like NBA star Shaq, movie stars like Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Kevin Spacey, recording artists such as John Mayer and Weird Al and late night talk-show hosts like Jimmy Fallon. You can even follow the musings, er, ah, tweets of...

Seems, however, that in the Twitter universe, at least, I'm a minority.

The Globe and Mail newspaper reported last week on the findings of a recent survey by the polling firm Ipsos Reid. They found that 1 in 100 Canadians use Twitter.

Moreover, said the Globe, the study polled 824 Canadian adults online and found that while 26 per cent of respondents are aware of Twitter, only 6 per cent of them had "actually spent some time coming up with witty 140-character messages". (Yeah, and if you ask me, considerably less than 2 per cent actually succeed in demonstrating how witty they are!) Astoundingly, this figure translates into about 1 per cent of the Canadian population. Amazing.

Now 824 people isn't much of a sample size. Nevertheless the survey would seem to portray the majority of Canadians as a bunch of techno-pesants. Six per cent of those polled had actually used Twitter? What provincial backwater, hole-in-the-wall are these people from? Have they been living under a rock? Don't they watch TV, read newspapers, browse the interwebs?

Say what? They have lives? Oh, never mind.