Old Fogeyisms: Twitter Edition
I’m a little less than two months shy of my 57th birthday. Of course, I can’t predict when I’m going to die, but barring a medical miracle, I’m several years closer to my death than to my birth.
As a result of my advancing age coupled with a bad case of rational thought, my dreams of a fabulously rich, voluptuous, nubile woman marrying me for my elastic band collection, fulfilling all of my sexual desires, and keeping me in the opulent life that I know I truly deserve have faded considerably. My dreams haven’t died, but they’re on life support and somebody should pull the plug.
The only sensible opinion I can come to is that it’s time to polish up my old-fogey credentials. If the truth be told, my old-fogey credentials aren’t really in need of any polishing, but being a recluse leaves me with a lot of time on my hands, so what the heck.
Here goes.
I’m not a technophobe. In fact, in an earlier life I programmed computers for companies that employed me to write custom software for their businesses. Today, I use a computer in my day-job, which is writing marketing material for companies that sell software to other companies.
Plus, I use a computer to churn out this blog. Many people have suggested that this is a waste of a perfectly good computer. I have trouble arguing with them on that, which, I suppose, is exactly the point. If I were any better at arguing, this would be a better blog.
And I have an iPhone. How much more of a technophile can I be?
Despite being somewhat tech-savvy, there are a number of things about the Internet that I don’t understand. (Here’s where the old foginess comes in.) Rather than asking you to read a blog post longer than Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, causing readers to rebel against me, I’ll just discuss one such lack of understanding today. If I feel up to it and don’t die in the interim, I might talk about others in future posts.
I understand basically what Twitter does. You can broadcast messages of up to 140 characters to everyone who is “following you.” So, you ask, what is it that I don’t understand about Twitter?
I get the what. What don’t get is the why.
Let me explain.
I was talking to a client recently about social media and the topic of Twitter came up. Her immediate, loud complaint was that Twitter is narcissistic. That, however is not my primary grievance.
True, there is a lot of narcissism on Twitter, but every once in a while you read about it being used, for example, to organize a demonstration against a stolen election in a country that has, to be overly diplomatic about it, questionable democratic practices.
That is hardly narcissistic. Far from it. So Twitter can be used to advance truly noble, definitely not self-centered goals such as freedom, democracy, human rights, peace, love, and groovy.
That having been said, while Twitter can serve noble purposes, from what I’ve seen, it is more often than not put to primarily narcissistic ends. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong Twitter streams, but the typical message seems to be something along the lines of the following:
meandonlyme3867 listening to Swallowing Raw Garden Slugs by The Livid Lunatics ♫
or
meandonlyme3867 walking my dog in the park
What I want to know is I why should I care one whit what the hell @meandonlyme3867 is listening to?
If she told me whether she liked the song Swallowing Raw Garden Slugs or the group The Livid Lunatics and I knew @meandonlyme3867′s taste in music, that might help me. It would give me some hint as to whether I too might enjoy that song and group, but just telling she is listening to it, does me no good.
And walking your dog in the park? That’s hardly informative. Tell people which park, how much money you’ll be carrying, whether you expect to be alone, and whether your dog is likely to attack someone who mugs you. Now that’s what I call informative.
@meandonlyme3867 is probably a wonderful human being and a pillar of society, but I couldn’t give a flying … well, you know what about what she’s listening to and where she’s walking at this moment.
(By the way, I made up the song “Swallowing Raw Garden Slugs” and the group “The Livid Lunatics”. If there really is such a song and/or group, I apologize. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. Then again, if they do exist I have a question for the “artists:” Are you naturally out of your mind or are you on some exceptionally bad-shit drugs?
In addition, at the time I wrote this, there was no Twitter user with the ID meandonlyme3867. If one exists now, all I can say is, get a freaking life!)
So yes, there is a lot of narcissism on Twitter, but that’s still not my primary gripe. What bothers me most about Twitter is the superficiality that it requires thanks to the 140-character limit Twitter imposes on messages.
Superficiality
Sure, if 1) the government has just done something blatantly evil; 2) the nature of that evilness and all of its implications and manifestations are readily apparent to everyone; and 3) the remedies are equally obvious then, “Protest at 3:00 pm in front of the Ministry of Truth,” is all you need to say to get the revolution going. In that case, 140-characters is more than sufficient.
However, if the underlying issues are many, subtle and/or complex; the populace requires some convincing of the underlying needs; and/or the appropriate solution is far from clear to everyone, then Twitter isn’t going to cut it. For example, if Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, had tried to get his thoughts out on Twitter, it might have gone something like the following:
tomjefferson06 When in the Course of human events, it Bcomes necessary 4 1 people 2 dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another CNP
tomjefferson06 &2 assume among the powers of the earth, the sepR8 &= station 2 which the Laws of Nature & of Nature’s God entitle them, a de¢ respect 2 CNP
tomjefferson06 the opinions of mankind requires that they should Dclare… aw, screw it. Down with the British!!
Who knows, if Tom Jefferson had relied on Twitter, what is now the United States of America might have remained a British colony and only gained it’s independence when Canada did in 1867. Then, instead of heading to DC to gape at the Washington Monument, American tourists might be heading to Ottawa to try to find a monument to John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister. (We’re not as big on monuments here in Canada as they are in the US.)
As a Canadian, I wouldn’t object too loudly to that, but I believe the world would be a lesser place without the USA. There’s that and the fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney might have ended up as Canadians. So, I think we should be very thankful that there was no Twitter in Tom Jefferson’s days.
Oh, by the way, someone named Birdinhand (Twitter ID: Birdinhand2) from a country called Shalampax is campaigning to become the most-followed person on Twitter. He currently has only 33 followers, so he has a long way to go. If you’re on Twitter, please follow him. That way, you can help to further his goal and prove me to be a hypocrite at the same time. Now, that’s what I call efficient!
Note that Thomas Jefferson (TJCoolJay1776) is generally credited with the bulk of the US Declaration of Independence.
I consider myself quite tech-savvy as well, rocket scientist and all, and I don’t get the appeal of Twitter, either. Truthfully, my life is not so empty that I’d need a play by play on say my darling 20 month daughter (RoxyPoopinator08: Played in Daddy’s ivy, pooped drawers, & ate roach skeleton cats left behind. Crunchy) or my much loved and sexy husband (BelovedsDragon1983: I’m afraid to find out what Roxy just ate in case it makes me throw up again). That goes even more so for my teenage daughter (heaven help me if I get a play by play) and my six year old son. If I don’t want to know their every move, why would I want to know someone else’s?
It might also be noted that my life isn’t empty enough to take the time to pass out a play by play on my life either, and, if I did, I’d be seriously concerned about the mental state of anyone interested in reading it.
Stephanie Barr: Re Thomas Jefferson, you are absolutely right! You probably won’t believe this, but I knew that. When I wrote this, I even looked it up to make sure (I had to because, being a Canadian, I probably couldn’t have quoted the opening lines otherwise), but for some reason my fingers still typed Ben Franklin. And despite proofing it several times I didn’t see the mistakes. I have since corrected my mistake. Thanks! (For those of you reading this later and wondering what Stephanie and I are talking about, where it now says “Thomas (or Tom) Jefferson” in the post it used to say “Benjamin (or Ben) Franklin.” Why? Because I’m a complete idiot, that’s why.)
Re spewing stuff on Twitter: Oh, come on, Stephanie. Feed us that information please, because enquiring minds want to know.
P.S.: When I make really stupid mistakes like that Ben Franklin instead of Thomas Jefferson one, I beat myself up for days about it. So if I sound depressed in my blog postings or comments over the next few days, that’s why.
Huh, I wish that was the worst mistake I made daily. Last night, the oven was left on. And I’m a rocket scientist, remember?
Joel, if you REALLY want to know my daily play by plays…
(SafetySchmuck293: Started fourth telecon of the day. People are arguing trivialities.
SafetySchmuck293: So bored I’m doing origami with post-it notes during telecon.
SafetySchmuck293: Cleaned drool off keyboard. Telecon on SAME chart. Hope key impressions come off cheeks.
SafetySchmuck293: Eating delivered french-fried Shetland Pony to try to keep from falling into coma.)
I might know why you have a hard time getting girls. You seriously need a hobby.
Stephanie Barr: About the mistake, I write for a living (not this; I would starve on this). I really should be more careful.
Re your daily grind. See, that’s what I’m talking about. With material like that I don’t know why you’re not Twittering away. It would give you something to do during the telecons and it’s way more interesting that what most people post on Twitter.
So you think my lack of a life in general has something to do with my lack of a love/sex life? You know, that sounds crazy, but you might just be right.
O.K. you two, get a room! But seriously folks, as a fellow 57 year old, this is all there is! There are no sugar daddies (or voluptuous nymphettes) because at our age if they are out there they are already taken. And as for twitter, what’s the point? Who cares? Who has such a pointless life that it even seems important?
Jan from BetterSpines: This is all there is? Holy crap! That’s depressing. What’s the point of Twitter? That was my question. I asked it first. Sorry, I don’t have an answer.
What have you got against twits, Joel? Some of my best inspirational leaders are twits. You did see that Newt the Poot Gingrich is twittifying the Battle of Trenton as George Washington, correct? Maybe @birdinhand2 can tap some of Pootie’s 1.7 million followers. I think that figure is surprisingly low considering the number of idiots in the good old US of A.
Every read any George Jonas? I remember a poem he wrote back in the 60s that so outrage William F. Buckley that he was tempted to invade Canada to hunt Jonas down and round him up for being cheeky.
Doctor Faustroll: We (Canadians) like to compare ourselves favorably to Americans because it’s much more enjoyable than criticizing ourselves, but the truth is we probably have at least our fair share of twits. And that’s just in our current government.
Twit Gingrich has 1.7 million followers? Damn! The world is in much worse shape than I thought.
If Buckley mused about invading Canada to get at Jonas, I’ll bet he wasn’t doing his musing during the winter.
You are obviously reading my one daily tweet as I always talk about taking my dog walking. How embarrassing! And you! There’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t find a nice woman if you really wanted to. You’re just like my brother who is also 57. He keeps thinking that Catherine Zeta Jones will realize her mistake in marrying Michael Douglas and come looking for him. Really! Just join eHarmony.com and meet some nice 57-year old lady who lives in your town. I know lots of people who have done just that and are very happy.
Patricia: I can honestly say that the fake dog-walking tweet didn’t come from you. It was intended to be representative of a number of tweets I’ve seen from a number of people, most of those real tweets did not actually involving dogs or walking.
I joke a lot, but tell your brother that he is being irrational and unrealistic. It does him absolutely no good, and possibly a lot of harm to continue with thoughts of that nature. Catherine Zeta Jones is going to be calling me when she realizes her mistake in marrying Michael Douglas, so your brother doesn’t stand a chance.
Twitter is kept alive and on the front burner because the “social media” experts need it to be there! Until the next big thing, tons of people are out on the lecture circuit convincing the lemmings to follow them off the cliff.
It’s crazy. But when the “social media” experts keep it alive and the old fogey newspapers think it’s cool to discover this new thing and write about it, Twitter will remain hot.
It will die soon – absorbed by Google and made into something valuable.
Or not.
GoingLikeSixty: That Google prediction isn’t particularly bold (particularly with the “or not” after it). Soon enough, Google will own everything. I’m expecting them to put an offer in on my underwear any time now.
Eww!
Stephanie Barr: “Eww!” You can say that again, but why would you? Or have you seen my underwear?
It’s the notion of buying (at Google-sized levels) anyone’s used underwear. I’ll take your word for it that it’s not appealing.
Stephanie Barr: I’m still trying to figure out why Google bought Blogger back in 2003, other than the fact that they share an “o,” “l,” “e,” and two “g”s.
There’s something comforting about hearing the words Twitter and groovy in the same post. A blast from the past juxtaposed against the way of the future. Although if we had Twitter in the 60s, “groovy” might have been worn out long before it was. And that’s a good thing. Peace, Joel.
nonamedufus: If we had Twitter back in the 60s we would have been far too busy tweeting (or is that twitting?) about the tangerine trees and marmalade skies to ever get groovy. Peace.
Great work, Joel. There’s a whole boatload of comedy on “What would such and such tweet” ideas alone. Love the Jefferson one.
GREAT TWEETS THROUGHOUT HISTORY
@HonestAbe1860: Enjoying the play. Afterward, Mary and I are going to
@JFKCamelot: Enjoying the motorcade thru Dallas. Almost 2 the overpass. Was that a gunshot?
@PRevereHorseman: The British R Coming!
@BostonGuy1775: RT@PRevereHorseman The British R Coming!
@SittingBull: White man at bottom of hill. Not see us at all. This be easy.
HAHAHAHAHA! Ooh, ooh, I want to play!
JuliusCaesarGodsGift: I porked Cleo at Brutus’ last night, right in front of his uptight wife. Brutus was pissed. Too bad. What’s he gonna do, kill me?
Powhawton1607: I menat to kill them all on sight, but Pocahontas says no. Oh well, what harm could they do?
MAntoinetteI: So they want equality, it’s not like they want to chop all our heads off or anything. I told Louis, throw ‘em a party.
DK & Stephanie: Thanks! Great tweet additions.
This would have been much more impressive had it been withing the 140 character requirements. As it is I was thoroughly impressed with your ability to scrunch down Tom’s words into Twitter type words. “descent” ( I don’t have the character for cent easily available on my keyboard) was way cool and didn’t take me nearly as long to figure out as I thought it might.
Jen: Actually, I’m fairly certain that they do fall within the 140 character limit (just). You have to strip out the posting user’s ID. That was just intended to display the way Twitter displays messages on the timeline, i.e prefixed with the poster’s ID. The ID is not part of the message. The reason I’m fairly certain that they are all within the 140 characters is that when I wrote them, I wrote them on the Twitter Web page using the twitter submission box, cutting the messages down until they fell within the 140 character limit. I don’t think I added anything when I pasted them into the blog post, although the first @tomjefferson06 one was exactly 140 characters.
You know, the only thing I can think of that is more superficial than twitter is writing a blog post about how superficial twitter is.
Well, maybe not. There is all that inane cocktail party chatter:
“Hey, what about those Knicks?”
or maybe singles bar chatter
“nice shoes…”
Personally, I used to just make long profound statements whenever I met anyone, but now people tend to avoid me. I just don’t understand why. I get dozens of people to drop EntreCards on my blog, so I must be interesting to someone, right?
aldon: Without a doubt, EntreCard drops are the ultimate indicator of your profundity and the droppers’ interest in you.
One of my big issues with Twitter – or should I say Twitter users – is that it is meant to be SOCIAL networking. When I went on there regularly I would try to engage people by commenting to them and was completely ignored. Needless to say, I don’t go on much anymore.
As for being narcissistic…isn’t everything on the internet nowadays narcissistic?? Blogs, Facebook, Myspace, etc. All of these are ways for people to say “Look at me!” and yes I realize I have a blog so yes I’m in on it too. You can even see it if you go to a sports site or music site that has a forum there is always a few people who post on it 100 times a day yet they mostly have nothing to say…they just want to be seen and have people think they are important.
Theresa: Re social networking, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find it difficult to be sociable in 140 characters of typed text. If you want to be sociable, send me an email or, much better yet, give me a call.
Re everything on the internet being narcissistic, no, that’s way too much of an exaggeration. NASA is on the Web and has some great stuff on its site that is about the farthest (quite literally) you can get from narcissistic. On the Web, I can buy books that have nothing to do with me. Governments make some services and much information available over the Web. And more. But are there things on the Internet other than Twitter that are narcissistic? Yes, absolutely! Like I said in the post, I restricted my comments to Twitter only because I didn’t want to end up writing a blog post longer than Les Misérables (the book, not the musical), but I might get to some of the other ones later. (Blogs, narcissistic? Heaven forbid! Of course, if I ever get around to writing that one up I will probably make it my last post.)
The narcissism thing goes only so far when you are committed to bringing on the bomb. The great thing about the Internet is you don’t have to cover you tracks. You just piggyback on some righteous asshole and do the Kafka thing.
I love reading about the Kafka things.
Doctor Faustroll: OK, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not getting the Kafka reference. I’ve read three Kafka books (The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika) but that was a many years ago. It’s probably well past time to pull them off my bookshelf and give them a reread. To my vague recollection of his books, “the Kafka thing” would be a metaphor for ridiculous, exceedingly oppressive government bureaucracy, or depression layered on depression. (Although that depression layered on depression thing may be less a recollection of stuff I’ve read in his books than a recollection of stuff I’ve read about Kafka’s life. My recollections may be confused on that.)
Oh, in case you are wondering, kidding aside, if the only choice is between narcissism or a commitment to bringing on the bomb for some “holy” end, then I hope the world becomes much more narcissistic.
Okay, I’m as much as an old fogey as the next person… but I won’t be 57 for another six months, so you’re much more mature than I am and I look to your sage advice these things. I have a computer and an iphone and I have only recently learned to Twitter… narcissistic bitch that I am! If only we had such technological wonders when I was in high school & college… who knows how my life might have turned out differently? As a phone-o-phobe, I’ve missed out on many opportunities for social interactions over the years. Instead, today I have virtual social interactions… is this good or bad?
CatLadyLarew: You say that “As a phone-o-phobe, I’ve missed out on many opportunities for social interactions over the years.” As a highly neurotic nerd I’ve probably missed out on far more opportunities than you have, so you’re better off than I am.
Re having virtual social interactions, they are better than nothing, but I’ve never found them anywhere near as satisfying as real social interactions. Then again, I don’t have many of either.
P.S.: Thanks for respecting your elders.