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It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not on it. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization. Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention span crumbling like a Roman aqueduct. The endless favoriting and retweeting of other people’s tweets? Sounds like a digital circle jerk. Birds were born to make the repetitive, pleasant, meaningless sounds called twittering. Wasn’t the whole thing about us featherless bipeds that we could give connected intelligible sounds a cumulative sense?
-- n+1
They concede there is good news to mix with the collapsing of our civilization, such as the supposed revival of the epigram and aphoristic wit, but is there really a lot of that? Well, if the Internet were strictly for literary and scientific genius, cyberspace would be almost as empty as outer space. The real virtue, I'm sure, is that just about everyone can play. You throw in your two cents, I throw in my two cents, and pretty soon we have change for a dollar! Meanwhile, if you need to, we can imagine that we are the literary diamonds glittering in the wasteland rather than more of the scrolling chaff.
-- n+1
They concede there is good news to mix with the collapsing of our civilization, such as the supposed revival of the epigram and aphoristic wit, but is there really a lot of that? Well, if the Internet were strictly for literary and scientific genius, cyberspace would be almost as empty as outer space. The real virtue, I'm sure, is that just about everyone can play. You throw in your two cents, I throw in my two cents, and pretty soon we have change for a dollar! Meanwhile, if you need to, we can imagine that we are the literary diamonds glittering in the wasteland rather than more of the scrolling chaff.
