When I first looked at Twitter, I thought it was the retarded little brother of blogging. They call it micro-blogging -- a tweet can only be 140 characters long. Who has an attention span that short? Teenagers.
But then I saw how Twitter could work as a news feed. The New York Times and CBC both have twitter feeds. Every tweet they send out features a brief headline with a link to the full story. And then I discovered the ability to tweet a link to a picture, sound file, or video. With an iPhone, and the right application, you can do all of that on the go. Very cool.
I also use Facebook, but it often feels like a maze of options. It's easy to get lost. Twitter's streamlined nature makes this even more obvious. Forget walls and notes and status updates and applications and surveys and quizzes and all that garbage. Twitter gives you one simple feed.
And then there's Twitter poetry. Can you write a meaningful poem in 140 characters or less?
Here are all the poems I have tweeted, so far.
* * *
The infant child up and died
but managed his first step at 5.
How'd baby manage the trick?
Daddy's skill at mechanics.
* * *
Crackheads are a horror.
Wine collectors are connoisseurs.
Escargot or just a slug?
Only one gets crushed in the war on drugs.
* * *
We are all so soft and sweet
Let us kill and chew and eat!
Though we haven't eaten long,
Soon all of us will be all gone.
* * *
If you're interested in seeing my tweets, just follow nikmaack on Twitter.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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2 comments:
Your first thought was the rightest. And I can say that because I have absolutely no experience with Twitter or iPhones or any of it. That makes me the best authority on hand, I'd say. And as the most austere and unimpugnable authority in the land (I'm gaining rank) I have decreed by fiat and order of the King (that's me, don't you know) that it's all an affront to the Holy Mother Church and therefore must be spun upon the spit and burnt upon the stake.
As if we hadn't enough outlets for the idiot-children of the world to incessantly publish their ill-informed, conjectural, two line op/ed "statements of fact..." No, we needed something to meet the gap of incredibly short and emotionally hollow communications left between text messages, instant messages, and blackberry emails.
Finally, I can publish every errant thought that squeaks humbly through the empty chambers of my mind in such a way as the whole world could logon and see it - that is if any of them cared. They don't of course. So it's really just me and a few friend(s) who might *MIGHT* bother to take the occasional glance; and not because any of us is interested in seeing what the other's written, but truly out of some sickly selfish mental undertow of implied karmic reciprocation: that "if I'm looking at someone else's, then surely they, or someone, somewhere must be looking at mine."
The internet wasn't crowded enough, I suppose, hadn't been covered completely yet with the dried, crusty semen stains of comment after comment, that so quickly became the norm when Satan and his merry band of assholes-with-degrees-in-marketing figured out that they could quadruple the number of clicks-per-visitor if they let every douche bag with an asshole make a spectacle of himself, voicing a meaningless, unwanted opinion that only serves to taint the experience of all other onlookers while muting the significance, if any, of the actual, original content. Remember that, you sick fucking world? Content? Remember what it was before you mutated it all into endless responses and interpretations and verbose editorials? Not to mention the flame wars, shameless plugs, and disputes over punctuation, definition, usage, form, and meter.
Needs be to extinguish the last few pixels worth of unoccupied space and unexpressed thought, right? Silence is too raucous for this crowd. Must that it be killed by chirping twits and twitting twats and flapping cunts whose wonders never cease.
What little good one Nik Maack might muscle 'way will ne'er be 'nuff to warrant any execution's stay. It's to the gallows! Out damned spot!
Fuck Twitter.
Roy,
You kid, in part. But there are some flaws in your thinking. For starters, Twitter doesn't ADD anything to the Internet -- it reshapes what's already there. Sounds like a minor quibble, but it's not.
Back in the day, I used IRC and Usenet a lot. These were the tools available, and we liked them. Now someone comes along and says, "I've now invented a new way to talk on the Internet -- Facebook."
Or Twitter. Or FML. Or whatever.
This doesn't add more people and more conversation -- it's just another tool for talking. The great thing about the Internet is, if the tool works, great! People will flock to it and use it. If the tool doesn't work, it dies out.
Yes, a lot of Twitter is teenage social networking bullshit. For the longest time, that's exactly why I avoided it.
"I'm at school!"
"I'm so bored in class!"
"I'm going home!"
"I'm at home!"
"I like watching Gilligan's Island after school!"
"Having dinner!"
And on and on. Who cares? Shut up!
But there's no denying that the teens often pick up and use the tools that the old fogies hesitate to touch. And now that Twitter is maturing a little, it's a different flavour of stuff.
It's not always good. There was a Citizen reporter "live tweeting" the trial of our good mayor. At first, this struck me as an awesome use of technology.
But then I read the 50 tweets in a day, and a lot of them were dull and pointless. Now this person is talking. Now this argument is happening. Now there's a recess. And we're back. The judge is scratching her armpit...
SHUT UP ALREADY!!!
But complaining about the noise on Twitter is like complaining about a bad radio station. You've got the dial in your hand! Turn it. There's no reason you need to listen to top 40 if it makes you writhe in pain. There are classical stations out there.
It's a useful tool to know what your friends are up to or thinking about -- assuming you have friends on Twitter. It's also a good way to see what's going on in the news.
I'm still hoping for someone to tweet only weird web pages they find. Last night, I came across a video of Jim Carey singing "I am the Walrus" on YouTube. I had to share that with the world, because it was just so god damned bizarre.
Yelling at Twitter and praising Blogger while dissing Facebook but praising YouTube while mocking StumbleUpon while loving something else...
On one level, it makes sense. Some tools will work for you, others won't. Some, it's easy to filter out the noise, others not so easy. But they're all just tools to help filter information.
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