Twits
You may have noticed recently that Twitting is all the rage now.
Last week, George Stepnanopolis conducted the worlds first network Twitter interview with John McCain. Celebrities are twitting all over the place. Senators were twitting during the President’s recent address to Congress. I guess you could say that the twits are everywhere.
For those of you not in the know, Twitter is a social networking tool that sets up mini-blogs for the purpose of instant communication in batches of 140 characters or less. It is also the devil (c’mon, who didn’t know where this rant was going?)
What once began as an internal tool for Odeo employees to communicate with each other (here’s a TMR clip about Odeo back in pre-Twitter days), has turned into a rampaging fowl-beast with an ever tightening deathgrip on the means of communication in this country.
What with the emergence of text messaging, IMing, and Twitting, regular e-mails seem like a relic of a bygone era. But my objection isn’t rooted in the evolution of the medium. My objection is that the evolution is, in itself, a regression. The technology that seems to win out is always the one that favors the simplification of ideas.
You see, Twitter doesn’t actually bring anything to the table. It doesn’t allow people to contact those who were previously out of reach. It doesn’t increase the potential of a writer or blogger. It doesn’t even take a picture of a bluetooth sitting on top of an iphone.
Twitter has created nothing more than another source of stimulae to capture the ever waning attention spans of the ADD Internet generation. Just another flicker of the lightbulb to captivate the moth.
And so blogs become mini-blogs, which become micro-blogs, which devolve into pulses of faux English l33t speak shot across the growing Cyberverse. In internet parlance, this trend is, most definitely FTL.
Pretty soon, even our most revered scientists and engineers will sound like this: