Let me start by confessing I do have a Twitter account. But I won't be fooled again. That is, I refuse to once more play the attention-seeking game, where everyone enriches the contest runner and surrounding marketers for the privilege of aspiring to be one of the very few big winners.

Twitter is a "real-time short messaging service". Users can subscribe to quickly updated text messages from an entity, though the messages are limited to a maximum of 140 characters. Think blogs, but faster and constrained to extremely short postings.

If someone subscribes to you, they're called a "follower", while subscribing to someone is called "following". The language is already revealing of the structure.

When I first heard of Twitter, I made the mistake of thinking it was like Internet Relay Chat (IRC), an old system that allows a group to exchange text messages among themselves. So I wondered why there was such a fuss over a variant of that ancient idea.

After I saw Twitter in use, I realised the difference was that, while IRC had all participants equal, Twitter implements a distilled version of many problematic aspects of blogging. Namely, a one-to-many broadcasting system that serves the needs of high-attention individuals, combined with an appeal to low-attention individuals that the details of one's life matter to an audience.

The "A-list" phenomenon, where a few sources with a large readership dominate the information flow on a topic, was particularly stark. Since the numbers of "following" and "followers" are visible, the usual steep ranking curve was immediately evident. A highly ranked person is free to attack anyone lower down the ranks, as there's no way for the wronged party to effectively reply to the same readers.

Getting a significant followership and thus being socially prominent is also important. Hence, there are major incentives to churn out quick punditry that is pleasing to partisans.

And Twitter evangelism has gone down a path similar to blog evangelism. There is the same two-step of arguing: roughly, it can be both diary/chat and journalism, thus a promoter can switch back and forth between those two concepts whenever convenient. The word "conversation" is contorted in a now familiar way, to mean mutual pontification among a tiny elite. The dream of potential stardom of a quasi-intellectual sort is dangled in front of the masses, though the only beneficiaries would be the data-mining companies profiting off the result.

When the entrepreneur Jason Calacanis offered $250,000 to have his product's account be a "suggested user" for two years, saying, "Twitter has the ability to unleash a direct marketing business the likes of which the world has never seen", that was a blunt illustration of the real dynamics at work. Though Twitter didn't accept his offer, monetisation must eventually happen somehow. People aren't being connected, they're being bundled up and sold.

Recently, venture capitalists invested $35m (£23m) in Twitter (adding to an earlier $20m in funding). Such a sizable investment can buy a corresponding amount of hype. I suspect money is partially responsible for some (though by no means all) of the breathless media coverage Twitter has garnered.

Note the potential survivor's bias effect. You may far more often hear from the rare person who has benefited from the service, than one who reports trying it and finding it a total waste of time. Some sceptical analysis by Nielsen Wire has pointed out that user retention is relatively low: "But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest."

Twitter is low-level celebrity for the chattering class. And the pathologies of celebrity are all on display, including the exploitative industries that prey on the human desire to be heard and noticed. My answer to Twitter's slogan of "What are you doing?" is: "Not playing a sucker's game."