A few days ago I stumbled across a yahoo headline that literally read: “John Mayer twitters: This Heart Didn’t Come With Instructions” with a picture of him and Jennifer “Hey Shut Up, Angelina Jolie Is Hotter Than You, Too” Aniston on the inside.
We HAVE to stop this thing. We have to. It’s getting absurd. I’ll give you a true example, and I mean, honest to God, I’m not trying to be funny here. I’ve been trying to wake up earlier in the morning, even though I don’t go into work until way later anyway and could sleep half of the day sleeping like a bum, drooling down the side of my chin, so I’ve been attempting to use the today show as an alarm clock. So I’m watching, and this greased up, ratfaced Ryan Seacrest wannabe Billy Bush is co-hosting the last hour of it (I guess Kathie Lee Gifford was changing Cody’s diaper that day or something).
And he’s expounding the virtues of Twitter and claiming it can be emotional and have, and he mentions Natasha Richardson’s death as an example and says that he twittered, in response, “those two boys have lost a mother…” ON TWITTER.
How deep. How profound! How emotional!
I remember sitting there on my couch thinking: the world has literally just punked itself. Because there isn’t a mental bar for entry for this thing if Billy Bush can get in on it. Right now, any douchebag with a hundred dollar blackberry can now expound a complete and merciless barrage of banality in the guise of profound thought in 140 characters or less. God is dead, and twitter killed him.
And you may be thinking that hey, Twitter is a democratic medium and everybody doesn’t have the time to devote a whole 141 characters worth of thought on something as minor as a person’s death. But maybe, just maybe, a person’s death, particularly one as untimely and possibly preventable one, should NOT be fair game for that “medium”. I think that as soon as cameras and VCR’s were invented, we got too wrapped up in witnessing ourselves exist. Now, our culture is all about immediacy. To hell with immediacy. I don’t want to see the firing synapses in your brain, I want to see an electrical current of intelligent, rational thought.
I have a friend who uses Twitter, but she’s linked it into her LiveJournal, so that she never writes about her life anymore, just has her LJ regurgitate the twitter feed. It’s horrid. The reason we have standout moments in life and can value them is because, by their nature, they stand out from the banality of our everyday lives. We’ve now convinced ourselves that we need to express the banality too, because the novelty of “putting it out there” in real time makes it seem as though it’s also exciting and worth consuming. It’s nice that everyone can have a voice, but not everyone can sing.
This is like the next logical step beyond reality television. Reality TV opened the floodgates to every untalented hack getting their 15 minutes of fame. And now we can all have our 140 characters or less. We need to destroy this thing somehow, with a method that’s so thorough that no amount of money will induce anyone to ressurect the concept.
I want to be the Adrian Veidt of Twitter, destroying it for the greater good.
FA Edit: May I rebut? Without Twitter, we would never have great pieces of art like this:
QED, baby.
Tags: Twitter
Twitter is actually quite cool. If you’ve got a band or a website you’re trying to promote, it doesn’t take a lot of deep thought to say “hey, check this out”. Plus, remember it’s more for phones than the computer. It can be boring going about your life through the workday, so hearing about John Mayer’s musing during your commute is a nice distraction during your day if you’re into him.
Great site dudes, keep it up.
Thank you! You’ve managed to put into words what I struggle to…I really don’t need nice distractions like hearing more dickslap repartee from the likes of John Mayer or reading up on the colour and shape of Bill E. Twitter’s sh*t. There’s something about being woken up into life by a narrow escape from death or birds *actually* twittering. Oh, and if Twitter is the only way you can access *emotion* about a tragedy such as *death* (Natasha Richardson) you’re far a-fucking-field. Time to get off your stinky ass and turn off that computer, read a book, go for a walk.