Due to lack of initiative to go to the library and check out some proper reading material, I’ve recently started to devour the slightly outdated Time magazines lying around my kitchen counter. Usually, my despairingly short attention span limits me to just the Briefing section, which includes my favorite “Pop Chart” page – a quick, chuckle-inducing chart depicting recent popular events on a scale of “Shocking” to “Predictable” to “Shockingly Predictable” – but the Time 100 issue finally motivated me to actually open up the magazine’s main section. I was looking forward to be enlightened on the cultural significance of Michelle Obama, on why Manny Pacquiao matters, on what on earth a man named Van Jones is doing to our environment. Instead, the first piece I ran into was one on Twitter, of all subjects, written by Ashton Kutcher, of all people (link).
For the uninitiated (including myself), Twitter is apparently the new online social-networking phenomenon, the unofficial heir of Facebook’s reign over the internet. “Twitterers” announce “Tweets” of 140 characters or less to the world in this new form of “micro-blogging”. Why? I have no idea. But Ashton described it as “a new and completely original form of communication,” and likened Twitter.com’s creators to the greatest inventors of the modern era: Samuel Morse (inventor of Morse Code), Alexander Bell (the telephone), Guglielmo Marconi (the radio), Philo Farnsworth (the videocamera), Bill Gates (most of your computers), and Steve Jobs (the rest of your computers). Really? Twitter is as significant an “invention” as the telephone? Is this another elaborate Punk’d setup?
Here I was, reading something more than a more paragraph long for the first time in a couple of weeks, and I was bored after the first sentence. I wanted to flip to another page, maybe just skip to the end to Joel Stein’s commentary, but then I realized in a minor but “holy crap!” epiphany that even though I had never used Twitter, I was doing the exact same thing as one of its members. I had finished reading the first 140 characters or so of the piece and wanted to move on. Thus Twitter itself isn’t an invention, but rather a reflection of the pace of our world. As our computers, our phones, and the internet process more and more data at quicker and quicker speeds, so must our brains; and Twitter seems to fit our rapid-fire thought-processes perfectly. Its potential as a platform for massive, grassroots-level communication is enormous, and it’s even been credited with enabling the recent protests in Iran (link). It’s like a blog, but quicker. It’s like a forum, but simpler. But I wonder if it’s really all that great.
Twitter is by nature a chaotic mess – on the macroscopic level, the website serves as a completely open forum for discordant and repetitive tweets and twits and twats; on an individual level, you never have to worry about making any sense when posting. Conan O’Brien’s new Late Night Show features a segment called “Twitter Tracker” in which an overzealous announcer reads the oh-so-(not)-exciting Tweets of celebrities, including gems like:
“Just got some bomb grub at Burger King” by Brody Jenner, and
“At Pete’s coffee in brentwood…love this place” by Cash Warren.
Is this meaninglessness really the “completely original form of communication” that Ashton was referring to? While there are instances, like the Iranian protests, especially suited to Twitter’s populist brevity, the vast majority of the information on Twitter smells awfully like spam. Twitter is engaging not because it’s communicative, but because it actualizes our exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies. Like reality shows, it allows us to peek into the lives of celebrities – like the more popular Facebook and Myspace, it allows us to pry into the lives of our friends.
Traditional prose, however, lets us do things impossible otherwise. It communicates subtleties, expresses emotions, and most importantly tries to make sense. Writing forces us to think critically and to analyze. It lengthens our attention spans and trains our patience. This is why I’m slogging painfully through this new blog, not to captivate readers but to relish in this sense of accomplishment I feel after writing a few hundred semi-meaningful words. Instead of introducing me to Twitter, Ashton Kutcher has inadvertently convinced me to sit down every once in a while and work through something longer than a paragraph and more meaningful than a tweet. Then again, I might just get bored halfway through and turn this thing into a celebrity gossip site instead.
@zhangstar: saw some articles about twitter and wrote a lengthy blog entry on the magic of traditional prose. probably no one will read it
(Image from Time Magazine)
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