TWITTERDESTROY – HOW MICROBLOGGING EATS SMALL CHILDREN AND THE CHILDLIKE

Hey folks,

First off, GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING!

Alright, now that that pleasantry is done with lets get on the move shall we? Good. I’ve been wanting to post this for sometime now, but Matt beat me to the punch a posted a pro-Twitter post. Now, as much as I enjoy stepping on people’s throats, ripping them apart and dancing on their bloodied entrails… I thought that would be mean to do to poor Murley so soon into the game. So I’ve waited literally as long as I could stand before I opened up a can of ‘whoop ass‘, to use the vernacular, on Twitter.

Now another thing is that yesterday, though I caught it this morning, the CBC’s ‘Here and Now’ did a bit on a ‘Shoppers Beware’-style twitter poster and frankly, praised the Twitter all up like there was no tomorrow. Frankly, for a news media to do this is like slitting its own throat with the erasered back end of a pencil in the ledge of a hospital’s roof: Redonkulous. So, let’s pull out the face-crushing boots and get this going.

My first worry with Twitter is a simple one and we’ve already brought it upon here on The Ninth Degree. It being the goddamn “push button, get bacon” style of instant gratification. Just like with laziness in other sectors of the media, in internet communications, Twitter is the lazy man’s blog. Really, we don’t post on Twitter to get knowledge, but to spew unrefined information which pretains to the lives of anyone, in ninty-nine percent of cases, about as much as trying to tally how many people own elephants in your grade 2 class when you were a kid.

Related to this is the ‘me’-centric view of thought these kinds of tools promote, simply because they are bent towards (in terms of marketing) getting not your thoughts on issues out there, but on you. You on you is a really interesting discussion, I’m sure… but lets be honest, do you really want people to know that your showering or doing to get your urethra replaced by a black market team of fifty-five doctors in the back of a supply-shed? Do you honestly think anyone else is really listening?

Sadly, no… we’re really not. Twits/Posts are absolute shots in the dark, an echo amidst the shadows of the internet. As we hopelessly attempt to attract attention to ourselves and our profound thoughts. In this way, blogging (and this blog too) share in the fault and it is apart of the ‘push button’ society we live in (a la YouTube, Digg and everything else). However, all of this self-reflexiveness does make us less willing to do simple research or fact check ourselves in the least. Furthermore, we tend towards apathy, in my personal view, if we take on these attributes and largely ignore larger issues unless they are smacking us right in the face.

In this regard too, we have been given the belief via Twitter that we are honestly and truly free of infringment and that our ideas, no matter how banal, can run free. What we overlook is that Twitter is a company, our ideas are now homogenized and practically theirs every time we post (blogging and WordPress have the same issue really in someways too). With Twitter though above other services, this is compounded by a character-limit. This might not seem like a big deal, but let’s actually take a look at it.

Most people who are pro-Twitter make the case that it allows us to be concise, but what if you want to say more. Sure, you can use a twitter extender app, but really beyond the tech-dorks like myself and some of you, I’d hope, that will not reach a truly mass audience, leaving most people to simply post at the 140 character limit. Really then people are forced to compress large concepts and ideas, if they choose to post them and that leads to weird Orwellian newsspeak running through posts, unlike even the 1337-H@X0RZ chatter of the pre-Twitter internet. Main concern here for me is that if it is difficult to handle large ideas in such a posting, people will aim for the small and quick… kinda like a CNN news soundbite.

Ooo, see what I’m getting at there? Well simply put, there has been a large compression of media as a whole. Movies are shorter than they once were, aside from the epic genre, TV shows have shorter runtimes due to ads, News is littered with soundbites and blurbs and now there is the answer to all those trends for the Internet in Twitter and services like it.

So then, as a whole all of these things contribute to our attention-defict society as we train the human brain to think is small, suggestable bits rather than as a connective whole. Funny enough, unlike the supposed freedom of media like this, it equally pacifies us, this is because with an inability to see the larger picture of politics, the media and the world around us, we can’t properly respond to it. This goes hand-in-hand with the apathy and the diluted attention I was talking about before. But, this is only the direct smaller effects…

What does Twitter’s encouragement of such trends create (as Twitter ‘didn’t start the fire’, but was created by and continues this trend)? Well, due to pacifism, apathy and a lack of attention, people around the world are being sold outright lies from their media, their peers and even, their governments. This kind of thinking, that which Twitter and a lot of ‘Web 2.0′ Super-media promote is exactly what corruption needs in nations, as we can’t properly piece things together.

I mean sure, there are events like flash mobs spawned by Twitter, but let’s be clear here: How many of those people were informed of the issue that prompted the flash mob via Twitter alone? My guess is exactly: None. Only those already awakened to the ills of the world and who have a willingness to do something can and will use Twitter for such things, while the company markets the product blindly on a mass basis.

You know, there are so many more issues I could talk about regarding this, but I have a meeting to get to shortly… so I may have to do another post at some point (keep this in mind when replying, as I’m not trying to avoid anything, but will bring about a Part II in time). Before I end this though, I want to respond to a comment made by Matt on his post quite directly (and I mean no offense nor to attack you here, man).

“With today’s desire to get everything from information to food as fast as we can, I thought it was a great foundation for the system.”

Really? That is a great foundation? I mean really this is behaviour which should literally be walloped out of people by any means necessary! This kind of foundation promotes lazy apathy and ‘baconized’ gratification, restricts creativity, kicks diction in its ass and makes everyone sound like a 1337-speaking version of a lobotomized Ezra Pound! There is simply nothing good about encouraging instant-satisfaction as it has led to a lot of our society’s problems I think.

So with all of that said, I think I’m done.

Enjoy folks,
- Brad.

PS: Add me on Twitter at @Brad_Evoy for great updates on my boring, self-obsessed, brain-dead life.