Let’s get one thing very clear before we even began to contemplate proceeding into the juicy meat of this blog…
I DESPISE TWITTER.
If I had the ability and power I would abolish the site not only from the internet but from the annals of history assuming that I did not hang its metaphorical destroyed corpse of damaged and corrupted code upon a metaphorical wall with a metaphorical three foot long, six inch wide, barbed rusty spike for the world to see. (Un) fortunately, I am not the brutal draconian tyrant of the Internet with an almost anal attention to detail so such things are completely out of my power.
Like every topic I choose to focus my loathing upon, I do at least have the common decency and intelligence to have my reasons which I establish after I have gone through the trouble of trying to see the benefits and flaws with any system.
Twitter like many societal phenomena that are a blight upon this Earth, started out on paper as something beneficial. Even someone with as much hatred for the site as me, has to admit that when used properly it can be good. Twitter is a free service that allows users to update their Twitter account from a computer or cellular phone with Internet access. It’s a “free” advertising outlet, and is actually a good way to allow a business and/or individual. There are several examples I can think of to illustrate this (and there are many more as I’m sure a productive reader is bound to point out) involve someone or a small group such as a musical band, comedian, or anyone who will be making a public appearance linking their Twitter account upon their own website (a service Twitter and Facebook both offer) which they can use to post status updates that directly affect an upcoming public appearance, such as a sudden schedule change. Or for a real life example, this unique on wheels restaurant in Austin, Texas which uses Twitter to let their customers know where their one location will be each day. Doing this will let those who follow their web site or even their “followers” on Twitter see a small description that directly affects them, those who are paying –not just financially but also donating their time– to see them. Other positive uses could include a company setting up a company-wide Twitter account in which all their employees could access the account for sudden updates that pertain to them.
When a person in a society succeeds greatly, they are idolized by that society. The more prosperous the country, the more this seems takes place if only because of the greater amount of media coverage that seems to go along with more prosperous countries. Look at our culture, who do we idolize? Famous movie stars, pro-athletes, musicians, the list goes on. These are people who in many cases make more money a year than the President of the United States makes per year counting all the government benefits that come with the job (free healthcare for the rest of their life, a life time salary, etc). These are people who are idolized to the point of worship by the public. As John Lennon sardonically said during one infamous interview when he was asked about how popular The Beatles had become, “It’s like we’re bigger than Jesus.” There are countless tabloid magazines focusing entirely on the daily lives of these people. And every day average Americans BUY and READ this trash every day. These are magazines that have paid paparazzi (another lovely byproduct of scum we humans have created) millions for one picture as an example: the first pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby went for a selling price of four million dollars. Let’s take a break to do some simple math. Let us assume that we have a class room of thirty college students who work part time jobs that pay them a very good salary that allows them to make twenty thousand a year. These college students combined income would have been a mere fifteen percent of the selling price for those baby pictures. If that amount of money were divided among those thirty students it would give each student $133,333.33; so much for school loans, huh?
Sites like Twitter that are designed for people who have a following will of course draw such people to it, so among the first people to begin using service are the celebrities. Thanks to major stars joining and others continuing to join daily Twitter’s popularity grows exponentially. In order to follow their idols, people join Twitter to both follow and as is most often the case, stalk.
Twitter, as I have stated is an extremely useful tool for those people/companies who use it properly. There is however, one topic that has yet to be discussed in this note when it comes to new and readily available technologies and a group of people such as Americans. Americans LOVE instant gratification and due to what some would call an information overflow with so much information and technology available to us at every moment of our lives, we are getting to the point where we feel the need to constantly be entertained. When a site like Twitter comes into contact with this type of behavior, you will end up having celebraties post their tweets that is of no serious value to anyone but themselves. These are entries that involve details of their personal lives that most people, wait make that most INTELLIGENT people don’t care about although the throngs of stalkers –I mean fans– will wait with abated breath for every detail this person posts.
So what does this say for the average Twitter user? Assuming this individual does not use their Twitter account for anything other than their business oriented uses, they do what the stars do, “tweet” about their day. The only difference is the average Twitter user is about as interesting as a blank piece of paper, but how we do love to emulate our role models. In fact if you were to compare the tweets of a regular user and a celebrity and remove the names of each user, almost every time the reader would not be able to distinguish one user from the other. During Conan O’Brien’s short run as the host of the Tonight Show, there was a segment on the show that illustrated just this called Twitter Tracker in which an annoying, testosterone fuelled announcer would constantly yell “Twitter Tracker” and boast that there was an “amazing” or “mind-blowing” tweet that a certain celebrity posted on Twitter that would “change the world” only for the tweet to be something mundane such as “I’m doing laundry.”
Twitter despite its useful features is most commonly reduced to a stage where the a celebrity can post all the common place events of their normal lives that anyone with a life would pay no attention to just so their stalkers can follow them for that mild ego boost these people have become accused to crave. As for normal people, it’s an outlet for their boredom and a chance to give them an ego boost by imitating the celebrities even if it is just a pointless waste of time.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, there’s a reason the word “Twit” is the key word in the construction of the word Twitter.
Cheers,
Eric Summers
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment