A round of applause for Simon Dumenco, who inspired me after an eight month hiatus to write. What outrageous act lifted me from complacency into the painful performance of tapping my fingers into a gunky keyboard?
Read it here: adage.com
For the past eight months some virus has festered under my skin, attacking my brain - abstract and disgusting. Then Dumenco put it into words. There is something fundamentally wrong in the latest developments of the information age. I've always hated the hyper-activity caused by mass instant access to electronic type, and now I can see the gooey cell: and it's name is Twitter.
What's wrong with Twitter, besides the financial aspect outlined in Dumenco's article?
Computers are the pipe and cell phones the flames for white people's addiction. Unable to join society due to their workaholic alienation, they seek escape, some easy, cheap, constant delusion. They Twitter. The twitter a hundred words and call themselves modern. The carve away at grammar, style, analysis, and say they are informed.
Why hail these lazy idiots as brave riders of a new technological wave? All that's new is not good. Let's say there's a new trend that dyes your shit green. Will we praise those who do so? No, because it's a useless, mindless trend.
That newspapers and reporters are "grasping" this trend, which is little more than a toilet for word spewage, shows how desperate the older generation is to connect to us kids and our damn-fangled new contraptions. If news sources want to compete in a larger market, they should focus on more IN-DEPTH coverage, with context and analysis, rather than this shallow notion of constantly being connected. I could repeatedly lick my fingers and stick it into an electrical outlet, but that doesn't make me a scientist. And reporters or citizen journalists or student journalists can repeatedly be witnesses to the news, typing out simplistic sentences to cover the events; but it doesn't actually make it journalism.
It seems counterintuitive to use blogging, a product of the internet and a favored yuppie hobby, to issue a tirade on another product/hobby. There's a difference, however. Blogging has been accused of showing a journalistic facade while containing only opinion, has been accused of lying, bias, and lazy reporting. All of these are true. BUT, bloggers are also capable of the highest caliber of journalistic integrity. Just like a blank sheet of paper can be used to either create a Tom Clancy novel or a Shakespeare play. Twitter is only capable of one thing.
Guess.
Twitter is yuppie crack, the product of an age that pushes kids to take SAT prep courses by age 10, snort adderall to get through high school, and live your adult years constantly wired to the news, markets, and consumerism. It's an Ultra-Puritan drive for hyper-activity. Gotta be perfect, gotta blog, gotta Tweet, get on the Blackberry, check your email, check your stocks, LIVE IN FEAR WHEN IT ALL FALLS APART.
The problem is this drives creates single-minded, one-dimensional people. I fear the new age of human beings, the ones that'll make the Diana Christensen character from Network look like a Renaissance woman.
I know every generation has berated and feared the next for its idiocy and laziness; that's not what I seek to do here. I am drawing a line in the sand:
on our side is the internet, blogging, cell phones, and digital television. On the other side:
Twitter.
