.
Roasted peanuts (closeup): photo by Geographer, 2007
Overheard in downtown street:
"So like I saw this guy at the mall with a Twitter failwhale carved into his hair."
"Awesome."
The attention span of a human in the age of the internet: the size of a peanut, with room for a few billion tweets to spare.
Inner space, it's the new lebensraum, as the shades of evening fall.
Twitter Fail Whale error message: image by Yiying Lu, 2009
Blueprint sketch by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network: photo by Jack Dorsey, 24 March, 2006
Emergency Tweet: photo by Paul Randall, 2009
Naked Pizza takeout and delivery store, Claiborne and Calhoun Streets, New Orleans: photo by Infrogmation, 2010
10 comments:
Great post tom, let me collaborate with a comment from mrs Greenfield:
"Social networking sites can provide a constant reassurance that you are listened to, recognized, and also important. Instead the face-to-face, real life conversation, which is far more unpredictable and stressful than the computer mediated one happens in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses, exposes your voice tone, body language, and probably even your emitted pheromones (which are molecules that transmit mainly sexual and social messages that others perceive unconsciously). "
Mariana,
Thanks very much for that, interesting quote indeed.
You see I have great faith and trust in the power of human language to contain and convey not only wit and humour but complication, tone, feeling, nuance, and in a mimetic way also, senses of the physical body and presence of the one conversing. I think sentences can carry all that information in a beautiful way that speaks to the existence of actual human dignity, such a lovely thing to be reminded of always. Reading, for example, Proust or Nabokov or Beckett or Samuel Johnson, is a total experience. But the broken-up bumbling toneless pseudo-literate bits and blurts of tweets speak to nothing but the lowest and laziest aspects of the human, revealing a species in great haste to make selfish profit in some way out of every moment, never mind the nuance or the complication or the memory of a dignity that has by now been lost for so long that I would very much doubt it is even remembered by most of those who would use Twitter. The people I know who use it, use it to snoop and blurt and do deals, and that's about the extent of it. There is neither beauty nor art nor humour nor consolation nor anything enduring in such a medium, it is a reflection and expression of the shallowness and distraction of a way of living in which people remain permanently unable to sort out real priorities, and accordingly any "network" built through its agency could never be anything more than a tissue-thin web of momentary convenience in which the basic relation of person to person would have nothing to do with respect and everything to do with quick, casual use.
Tom,
what are we missing?
4.20
grey rain cloud against invisible ridge,
golden-crowned sparrow calling in left
foreground, sound of waves in channel
gravitational field written
out in full, is there
sound a first approximation,
acceleration, so that
grey-white of sky reflected in channel,
tree-lined green ridge across from it
This is tragic laughter I'm feeling. (From Peanuts, including the images, of course, and Mariana’s, Steve’s and Tom’s responses.) I spoke to an old friend from college two days ago about Twitter. He's a computer scientist working in this field (a pioneer, actually, in instant messaging development) and although we're still connected as friends, I don't always understand where he’s coming from. His main objection to Twitter was that it was all about “push”, rather than “push-pull”. My assumption is that his criticism is mainly commercial, i.e., that the “push” that alerts you (and the rest of the Whole Wide World) to the benefits of Naked Pizza (or the presence, perhaps, of Naked Pizza’s mobile unit in an appointed place at an appointed time) doesn’t allow a “pull” to “capture names” for purposes of “re-marketing”. The Emergency Twitter image is incredibly funny, of course, but in conjunction with the “blueprint” image (how on earth did this get saved for some future time capsule?) and the Fail Whale website --- www.failwhale.com ---, please consider me thoroughly unsettled.
Apart from trying to conceive a powerful new prayer that might possibly succeed through massed mental concentration in displacing the monstrosity of Twitter, I can do no better than to repeat these words, which address the basic moral issue and deserve broad circulation: “There is neither beauty nor art nor humour nor consolation nor anything enduring in such a medium, it is a reflection and expression of the shallowness and distraction of a way of living in which people remain permanently unable to sort out real priorities, and accordingly any "network" built through its agency could never be anything more than a tissue-thin web of momentary convenience in which the basic relation of person to person would have nothing to do with respect and everything to do with quick, casual use.”
Next up, I think, should be consideration of the fascinating issue of Twitter “ghost writers”, i.e., how should the literary detective go about determining which celebrities write their own posts and which hire proxies? At least for a while, I believe we were getting the real Lindsay Lohan, poor kid. I do hope she eventually gets it together. Unfortunately, I don’t think misspellings (either the quantity or character of the mistakes) provide reliable clues.
"It's an extension of the celebrity culture in which people think their existence doesn't count unless everybody on earth gets to hear about it."
A reader of Henry Green so observes, drifting through and pausing to peruse Curtis's comment re. Lindsay Lohan and Twitter.
In speaking of Twitter I must confess I have no first hand knowledge from which to speak. Not that that appears to have stopped me so far. I see Stephen and I have equally been missing something, and that thing is the same thing.
It is common I think to remember one's first "real" experiences with certain technologies. The first time one watched television, for example.
My closest brush with having a "real" Twitter experience, I guess, was a conversation in a Safeway parking lot with a diagnosed bipolar fellow who lives on disability and spends much of his time, as he congenially related, lurking and snooping on the Twitter pages of certain locally and nationally well known people. My questions, Do they know you're snooping on them? Do they mind? & c. were dismissed politely, the way one is patient with the ignorance of a child. "Of course they know," he said. "Why else do you think they're doing it?"
I asked for a For Instance.
"Well, for instance," he said, "One way of doing it is to keyword the names of certain restaurants." (He gave the names of several high end establishments.) "That gets you to lots of stuff. Like there is this one internationally famous author..."
I asked for an identity. He gave it. Local author, famous indeed. Legit.
"She tweets her notes on all her therapy sessions. I read those. They're pretty funny."
(I guess he did not mean the internationally famous author MEANT the notes to be funny, but then one never knows, especially when one doesn't know anything.)
Anyway, this I think circles back to where the reader of Henry Green drifted through.
And now, in the ancient haunted house, a door creaks, as in old radio dramas, putting one in mind of Lamont Cranston and "Inner Sanctum".
"It's an extension of the celebrity culture in which people think their existence doesn't count unless everybody on earth gets to hear about it."
I think non-celebrities pay attention to celebrities and, particularly, enjoy seeing them in person, because it provides independent validation of their own existence, i.e., I know the celebrity exists because I’ve seen them photographed in the media. Therefore, I really exist.
Perhaps that’s really obvious, but that’s always been my impression.
I have been spending a fair amount of time lately with The Shadow and Inner Sanctum, as well as Tales From The Black Museum and the ever enjoyable Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (“the man with the action-packed expense account”) on the radio. I’d never heard them before and I’ve happily adopted the radio play as my principal form of entertainment.
Your observations and conclusions about Twitter were 100% accurate.
You could tweet this poem but it would have to be two tweets
Maybe three
On a serious note, I'm curious about what you think of this site: http://nanoism.net
Otto,
Okay, I bit on this one:
"When told the Backstreet Boys had broken up she took the cassette, her only one, out of the Walkman and crushed it. That’s Africa for you."
(But that response may have only been a ripple in the backwash of the moderate tsunami effected by "gracias, pero sí" -- I think I took it as a footnote, in fact.)
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