Twitter This!
This twitter idea has finally tipped the balance of communication from information to insanity. In case you have been living in a vacuum for the last week, Twitter has found its way into our national media consciousness. There were several people in Congress twittering or texting on their phones or Blackberry's while President Obama was giving his speech. That means instead of listening to what the President was saying, they were telling people what they thought of what they were not listening to. What?Twittering is restricted to 140 characters which is about two sentences, more or less which means if I was trying to develop a rational thought starting at the beginning of this paragraph I would have to stop right n......
Stream of consciousness is a wonderful thing, but keep it to yourself. When you have developed a thought and come up with an idea, then communicate it to the world. And if your idea can be completely expressed in 140 characters then it needs more development. 140 characters is not even a thesis of a good idea. If you are going to restrict communication to a certain length, why not restrict it to a Haiku, or require it to rhyme in a Shakespearean couplet. At least that would require some though.
Soon everyone will be so busy telling the world what they are doing at this moment in 140 characters and they won't have time to do anything else. This means no one will have the time to read what others are doing in 140 characters. This is eventually leading to the equivalent of a nationally broadcast digitally communicated circle jerk. OMG the whole thing is TMI from my BFF who is an SOB and I am LOL.
Forget the Dow Jones, forget economic recovery, forget the banking crisis, forget that we are fighting two wars..... right now I am... twittering what I am doing right now and what I am am doing right now is twittering what I am doing.... right now.... twittering.
Could there be a better word than "twittering"... it sounds like a complete waste of time.
As you were,
Jay
3 comments:
Thanks Jay;
It seems to me that much of the technology of today is used simply because we can. Not that it has any real importance or use. I feel sorry for the present generation that can't entertain or amuse them selves with out some sort of electrical toy. Enough said ,I agree completely.
Twitter's an interesting beast. I muck around with it a bit, and although on the whole it's useless, I've seen it used effectively. Cartoonist Jeph Jacques will spontaneously use Twitter to hold conversations between his characters, for instance. Another author uses it to create gradual narratives with a sort of real-time effect.
When I make a post on there (which is a rare occasion now), I don't think, "What am I going to have to cut to meet the limit?" but rather "how can I express as much as I can in a small space?" The result is actually somewhat vocabulary-expanding. It's an amusing toy at times, but the whole "fad" atmosphere around it is weird. They treat it like the next Facebook, which is a poor attitude toward it. It encourages people to abuse it rather than see what it's capable of.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind if Twitter replaced Facebook as "the next big thing." I'm sick and tired of people treating Facebook like it's the end-all be-all of the internet. We're capable of creating so much more than that giant flaming Web 2.0 disaster of very slight occasional usefulness. Twitter's not the answer to this by any means, but it's a step away from the clutter, nonsense, and emergent social expectations. Perhaps this will spark the desire in people to write something longer.
The thing is, you have to get people on board with a new idea before it can take off, and the general population doesn't want something they have to put effort into to receive from.
Anyway, those are my abridged thoughts on the subject. Apologies if my blog post-length comment cluttered up your page!
Hope to see you again sometime soon,
Harrison
P.S. In response to Bob: I feel the same way, and I want to be a video game designer. It's a great medium, but I think there's a ton of value in the outdoors and even board games. Everyone has some degree of imagination and creativity; the trick is getting people to exercise it.
P.P.S. This little cartoon is spectacularly relevant.
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