I do not like Twitter. I find Twitter to be the natural, albeit lamentable, consequence of a centuries-long degradation in communication, particularly in written works.
We began many moons ago with books – luscious, thick, long, wordy books! Then we moved into the realm of tracts and pamphlets after the advent of movable type. Slightly less long, slightly less thick, but in the right hands, just as luscious (perhaps more so because of the medium's brevity). Soon came newspapers, which were like regularly updated compilations of mini-pamphlets. Breadth and quantity made up for the lack of depth and quality in newspapers, but they still informed wide audiences in an admirable enough manner.
After another couple hundred of years and a few world-changing inventions later, the blog appeared as the new medium par excellence of the literary... errm... not elite... what would I call them? The literary avant garde? In a strange, bastardised sense, I suppose that works. Blogs (individually, at least) cut out the breadth of the newspaper, and due to the immediacy of the medium (coupled with a lack of editorial supervision) didn't do much to make up the quality, either, but the beauty (so it is believed) is that anyone can participate. Web 2.0! Democracy for the masses! Voyeurism and bitter rants, all vaunted as the great liberators of thought and discourse! Huzzah!
But that's all irrelevant now; we have Twitter. 140 characters or less to convey ideas, feelings, expressions, candid glimpses into one's personal life... Twitter makes perfect sense in light of Western man's cultural plate-tectonics.
With the advent of every new publishing technology – going from vellum, to the press, to the internet – there are two trends that emerge: one moving towards terseness, the other towards personal divulgence. Now, this isn't to say that books don't often give us unnecessary peeps into a person's life, or that blogs can't communicate great ideas, but by and large these trends characterise the new media of every stripe. Twitter embodies the apex of this progression. Its character limit is no place for profound ruminations on the human condition (or anything else), and the one question Twitter baits you to constantly answer is "What are you doing?" It doesn't get much more voluntarily invasive than that, does it?
I have previously described Twitter as a "vulgar" medium, and I stand by that. I lament what the new media are doing to better, older, more tried and true outlets, but this is progress, they say. I can certainly understand Twitter's expediency when used properly, but I still don't think I could ever bring myself to answer regularly that question that Twitter poses; a similar hesitancy, in fact, is why it took me so long to ever sign up for a blog site.
So, imagine my surprise when the literary savant (or something like that) August Wahnsinger went and started his own bloody Twitter feed! The nerve of that man! He probably doesn't even use a computer to do it. He probably just uses those electrodes he wired into his brain a couple years back to interface directly with his Twitter site! And he did this without informing me at all! Well, at least not until after the fact.
I suppose, for what it's worth, you might as well follow him or something to keep up with what he's doing, what he's writing, and so on. He's got the thing set up now, so it's best not to test his patience by not succumbing to his wishes. I have learned this lesson the hard way.
If you want in on this, signing up for a Twitter account is evidently pretty easy (he probably had his trained lemmings do it for him) and it can be useful enough. I mean, John Scalzi's cat is following August already, so this (at least in theory) proves to some extent the medium's efficacy.
Anyway, since August hasn't updated his blog for a while, I find it only fair to fill you in on this. I might not like Twitter, but I can definitely see what use it would be for someone like August. And it's interesting in its own way. So as I sweep my hypocrisy under the mat, do August a favour, and check out what's going on in that odd little ginormous mind of his.
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