Of Tweets, Twits, and Twitches
On second thought maybe I won’t start Twittering. Not yet. Not unless someone can convince me that it’s more than just…
“… the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin.”
From Nicholas Carr, via Justin Talyor.
Ouch. The “telegraph of Narcissus.” That’s good copy. Also, I still haven’t taken the time to really understand what Twitter is, or how it works. Is it basically like the old Status Update on Facebook? Mostly like the ones which say “…is taking a nap,” “…is making dinner.” Wow, awesome news. Dinner. But we could analyze that stuff all day and I think we can all rest assured that the government is spending trillions on studying this stuff as we speak.
What am I turning into, a curmudgeonly critic of modern superfluity? I like hearing those kinds of updates from some people -especially when it’s entertaining. Otherwise, there’s the “hide” feature on Facebook at least. Use it and save precious minutes. Someone who has really good Status Updates is our very own Eric Peters. He had a recent one that went like this:
“Eric Peters pities the poor, rotting Easter eggs forgotten and undiscovered in lawns across the USA.”
S.D. Smith likes this.
I saw where Ashton Kutcher beat Larry King and CNN at getting a million Twitter followers. That is a lot of twits. I mean tweets. It is also making it extremely easy on the dude who writes that feature in Sports Illustrated called “Signs of the Apocalypse.” I feel like I wasted time taking ten seconds to hear the news about it reported. How much worse would it be to actually hear anything that Ashton is doing unless he is Punking Andrew Peterson.
AP: What do you mean I’m a drug mule for Compassion International?
AK: Ha, Ha! You got Punked.
AP: Oh. Hold on a second, let me send a tweet about this.
AK: No way, I’m already doing it. I have a million followers.
AP: I think you’re actually Punking all of them, then. Because that is a joke.
Maybe I’ll start an even quicker and more immediate social connection medium: Twitcher.
Every three seconds or so all of your bodily movements, “Twitches,” are recorded and broadcast to all the people who think you’re a big deal.
I see money in my :::back spasm::: future.
A.S. Peterson has crafted a work of compelling historical fiction which begs the question, “Can this really be a debut novel?” With dogged fidelity, Peterson captures the spirit, manners, and social conditions present during the American Revolutionary War. We meet colorful, credible characters who navigate the high seas of life and love, dependence and independence, war and peace, truth and consequence, and despite forays into dark places, The Fiddler’s Gun is beautiful, lyrical, and redemptive.
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up.
I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul - my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder.
11-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute.
I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson.
Eric Peters’s body of work addresses a diverse range of topics, but hope is a recurring theme that gently percolates in the midst of it all. And yet, somewhere between the 2001 masterpiece Land of the Living, and Scarce, the flavor of hope that Peters’s work emits has evolved closer to a tone that is more resolute than what came before. And though the complexion of hope has a broad range, the lyrics from Scarce–while intermittently contrite and timorous as in previous efforts, are now strengthened and bolstered by roots that have grown deeper, radiating an underlying grit and security.
Having read The Great Divorce many times over the years, I’ve found this classic from the great C.S. Lewis to be full of startling clarity and depth on the differences between Heaven and Hell. The only thing both have in common is that both begin in the human will; we can either let Heaven enter us and rule in us to blossom into love and goodness, or allow Hell to infect and reign in our hearts by the daily refusal to submit to Heaven.
Even if you haven’t heard Room to Breathe, its still likely you’ve heard Andy Gullahorn. He’s what I’d call a heavy lifter by trade. He writes lyrics, plays guitar, arranges vocals and adds production help to the work of artists like Jill Phillips and Andrew Peterson.
Allow me to preface this by telling you that I am a great despiser of gushing reviews. I’d much rather write (or read) a scathing dismemberment of the latest Brett Ratner film or Terry Goodkind book than suffer through four hundred words of overblown hyperbole about even the best of things. But when asked to write some thoughts on Frederick Buechner’s Godric, no amount of distaste for high praise was able to intervene. I hope you’ll take what I say with the understanding that I do not say it readily or lightly.
Take celebrity out of the equation, and minimize the amount of self absorbed “What are you doing right now?” Any guesses what this leaves??
For many, especially in the design community, Twitter has become exactly that: a community. We share links to relevant articles, or inspirational art. We ask questions when something in our design doesn’t work right, and help others find answers. We use twitter to conduct surveys, and troubleshoot. And yeah, occasionally we throw out some fluff tweets that say things like, “I’m watching Psych, the greatest show on the planet” & find out a little more about the people in our community. As a result, I’ve learned so much about web & graphic design.
Is it a broken medium that it creates a false sense of community? Of course, but it’s no different from the Rabbit Room–you’re just limited to posting 140 characters at a time. It’s a tool; understanding how that tool works and the ways it can affect us is the key.
Thanks so much for this post and a great ::belly roll:: laugh!
Regarding Twitter, I just can’t imagine anyone who’d be interested in knowing the minutia about my life, such as how a poorly wired socket in my kitchen surged yesterday and blew out my coffee roaster.
Loren,
Really?!? My living room socket melted my EdenPure Quartz Heater just last week. Nearly burned my house down. I have to replace the wiring for that entire circuit.
thank you for this hard hitting expose on the evils of twitter. clearly you think it is the worst thing ever. seriously, though, remember when cell phones were the new thing? any time you were around anyone with a cell phone and could hear his or her conversation, it went something like this:
“where are you? oh.”
“me? i’m just sitting here in the dentist’s office waiting to have my teeth cleaned…”
followed by more minutia, gossip, griping about their jobs…whatever. then,
“yeah. okay, well, call me later.”
same thing, but see how much time we’re saving? things change, but they don’t change that much. people, in general, might be just a tiny bit self absorbed.
AP: What do you mean I’m a drug mule for Compassion International?
AK: Ha, Ha! You got Punked.
AP: Oh. Hold on a second, let me send a tweet about this.
AK: No way, I’m already doing it. I have a million followers.
AP: I think you’re actually Punking all of them, then. Because that is a joke.
Wow. Never expected to see those two names together. Ever. Brilliant.
S.D.,
Twitcher gave me a good laugh.
Jamin: Limited to 140 characters? :::voice and hands shaking, sweat beads forming::::
Like, I’m all, ” {indecipherable hand gesture}.” Know what I mean?
I will resist Twitter; I’ve already got my hands full with Facebook, email, my website, Rabbit Room, MySpace, and Banjo Hangout. I like blogging, mind you, but I like playing music even better.
Ron
By the way, right now I’m going to clean up my studio and then play music and then get ready for a friend to come over and then probably I’ll make a salad and brush my teeth after and then I’ll play more music and then talk to my wife and then after that my kids will get home from school and I’ll brush my teeth again after dinner.
Do you think some people use Facebook and Twitter and all that in a significant way, while others use it as a means to stave off the feeling of insignificance in light of the psychologically crushing weight of the American Celebrity Cult? The media screams “You are not important. You are not important.” What does that do, day after day, to a person’s mind? (I wouldn’t know anymore since I shut out as much of the World-Noise and World-Think as I decently can without losing complete touch with the culture).
Hilarious post, SD.
I’ll chime in and say I love Facebook statuses because I can see what my distant friends are up to. It’s quicker than phoning or emailing, but I still feel like I’m a part of their lives.
Tony from Pandora,
Honestly. I normally roast this particular kind of Ethiopian bean for seven mintues. At five-and-a-half minutes, I looked over to behold the beans becoming carbon. They burnt into charcoal. Not a lovely smell, that. The electrician came by the day and said the folks who hooked up the switch (not us) messed up the wiring. The back of it was black.
Ron,
I think you may be on to something there. I don’t have what it takes to come up with clever status updates on Facebook, so I figure Twitter would be a profile dedicated to how interesting and witty I’m not. And like you, Ron, knowing I’m typing with a word governor is just one more added stress to my life. Words are free, people. Use ‘em. It is for those reasons, and the fact that I’m so out of the loop that I only heard of Twitter last week (yet, am ahead of the times being in on the early stages of Twitcher *yeah, go me*) that I’m not a Twit, Tweet, Twitter-er or whatever they would be called. But I do believe there is a certain satisfaction and feeling of celebrity that can come from sharing the mundane play by play of your life, knowing that someone subscribed to hear about it. It’s a fuzzy feeling, afterall, when my status reads, “Stacy Grubb is eating a peanut butter and banana sammich!” and someone comes along who not only reads about it, but likes it, and takes the time to click that they like it so that I know they like it. I and my peanut butter and banana sammich are liked. Doggonit, people like me. Life is so good.
Stacy
Aaron likes this.
As for Twitter, I don’t have any interest in the minute by minute updates of my friends’ lives. However, my enemies lives are a different story. It serves me well to know, for example, that one of my arch enemies “has the whistling line from Do The Hustle stuck in his head.” I can easily exploit these small bits of information, and Twitter is a goldmine.
Oh thanks Aaron. Now that whistle line from “Do The Hustle” is stuck in MY head. If you know me and whistling, which you didn’t but now you do, you’ll know that this is sure doom for the remainder of my day/week/month.
Sheesh.
First off, funny post. It reminds me of a great YouTube video parody of something new called Flutter. Do a search sometime, it’s worth the time.
All of us come to any given topic with a given set of assumptions. And I think you’re making some assumptions that simply aren’t true. It seems like you — and the author of the blog you linked — are assuming that 1) users of Twitter do not use any verbal communication in their lives, but only stare at their computer screens or cell phones searching for the correct combination of characters to arouse the attention of those around them; 2) 140 characters is adequate only for talking about yourself, not pointing others to the world around you and the world around them or, dare I say, pointing them to beauty, or laughter, or hope, or even God; 3) Twitter is somehow the lowest common denominator of the concept of “online community” and is vastly different then, say, Facebook or Myspace or the Rabbit Room or this string of comments.
Obviously I’m being a little sarcastic and harsh, but I think you’re pointing to a symptom and calling it the problem. You’re saying that Twitter is the ultimate in narcissism, a false community. And you’re doing it on a blog. Hey, kettle, you’re black!
I “tweet,” and I’m on Facebook, and I read this blog and write on my own blog, which the Rabbit Room has conveniently allowed me to reference as I reply. And though there are many people, termed “friends” or “followers,” who are little more than pixels to me at this point, there are a fair amount of my face-to-face friends on these sites, as well. And countless face-to-face conversations lately have begun with follow-up on a status update, or a tweet, or a blog entry.
This is why I don’t believe that Twitter or Facebook or the Rabbit Room are evil; in fact, I believe that there is some honest good in them because they are enhancing my community and fellowship with my friends. For those who I don’t see often, I can keep up with them in the meantime. For those I see a lot, I can know what they’re excited about or frustrated about, and ask them when I see them.
Twitter is not the problem. The problem is turning inward, and that can take a variety of online and offline forms. The solution is to seek and build relationships with others. That, too, can take a variety of forms.
Thanks for the funny comments. Aaron, as usual, takes the prize.
And by “takes the prize” I do not mean he actually gets a prize.
I guess I need to put up a big disclaimer when I am making attempts at humor.
Note: While I linked to a serious discussion of Twitter, it was just a launchpad for some joking around. I think Twitter is just like all the rest of the stuff we do. I too have a blog, a Facebook account, and a billboard in Time Square updating my every move (NOTE: That last one was a joke).
So I am not actually judging the thoughts and intents of everyone’s hearts who uses Twitter. I’m probably going to do it myself whenever I can find a ten-year old to explain it to me.
Andrew Peterson (an unheard of Russian ballet star) does it, Abraham Piper does it, and I like to read those.
So fret not. This post is not of the serious variety.
SD, thanks for the clarification.
Regardless, your post got me thinking, and commenting. So thanks!
And by the way, that Flutter video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s.
Peace,
Bret
Wait a second here people. How is it possible that after 16 posts not single person has commented on the 5 year old lighting up a Camel? This deserves some serious attention - I’ve gotta tweet on this immediately.
Cindy Kasten Likes this.
My husband has the funniest status updates! He’s a very shy MENSA member, speaks few words a day but, his status’ are hilarious! I copy and save them.
Wow. Josh is right. I withdraw myself from eligibility for the imaginary prize on the basis that I missed the opportunity to comment on the picture. I’m ashamed.
And I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed with myself. I too have had “Do The Hustle” stuck in my head for 24 hours. Remind me not to mention that ever again.
sadly, anyone who joins the twittersphere now will have the distinction of joining *after* Oprah.
What I like about all of the aforementioned tools is that they let me be part of a community unlimited by geography and unrestricted by the need to find a mutually convenient time to connect. They help make my world broader — how else would I ever have discovered the music of Julie Lee or heard a sermon by Russ Ramsey or read the amazing writing of the contributors to the RR? And they make it easy for me to share those things with my friends, who share with theirs — so the beauty and the grace cover a wider territory.
And though I really don’t need to know the minutiae that some twits tweet, in a way, Facebook reminds me of letters my mother exchanged with hers on a weekly basis when I was growing up — “we had Alvina and Harvey over for peach pie on Sunday after church… got 40 hundredths of an inch of rain on Monday…” Sometimes there would be a recipe for a “new” noodle casserole enclosed. Somehow in the sharing of what seemed trivial and unimportant, it helped keep the heartstrings tied together.
On the downside, I am finding a need to develop yet another kind of self-discipline (not my strong suit). It’s far too easy to while away a big chunk of the day (and night) following the trails that any single post with a link can set me off upon…
Josh, I’m right there with you; that kid makes me want to bust out my meerschaum and take a nice, long, relaxing drag. But maybe that’s not what you meant?
I hope no one is saying that kids shouldn’t smoke.
That’s a mighty cute kid in that photo, SD. He could be a great spokes”man” for Marlboro Reds. All kidding aside, kids should only smoke their kiddie bubble pipes like famed kid star, Bart Simpson. I miss Billy the Kid.
Every time I see this picture, I laugh at how earnest the kid looks– like he’s lit up a hundred times. Nice, Samuel. Nice.
And I thought this was supposed to be a Christian site.
This is a Christian site. I have a cross notched in my Bible from where I went soul-winning and this site made a decision. My stats are amazing.
I think the tract I used was “How you, a simple website, can skip the scary bits.”
Funny, I found this site from a vine off of Twitter. I revolted against both Twitter and Facebook for a long time. I find MySpace to be jr. high, Facebook to be high school/college and Twitter to be young professional. Twitter is amoral. It can be narcissistic, being abused like any other human endeavor. However, Twitter has opened up a whole new world of information gathering I wouldn’t have been able to find before (like finding this site, S.D. Smith’s blog, & Abraham Piper’s “22 Words” blog to name a few). I ran across this article trying to see if The Rabbit Room was on Twitter to expand my knowledge base. Until then, I’ll keep reading a great site. Thanks guys.
I just joined Twitter.
Take That and Party.
http://twitter.com/samueldsmith
Twaitor.
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23IranElection
I think Twitter is being used as to voice protests against the results of Iran’s recent election.
That’s pretty exciting/interesting/relevant to this discussion.
Neil Postman nailed it in this interview from 1995 when he talked about the significance of physical presence as a key ingredient to real community. We can call Rabbit Room or Facebook or (gasp) Twitter a “community,” but they are not complete communities- they cannot fulfill our need to be physically present with other people. Your mind and mine can meet her in the Rabbit Room, but I can’t see your eyes or pass you an apple crisp. If I ruled the English language I would require online meeting places to use a word other than “community.”
Anyway, check out this youtube of Postman. The comments I referred to start at 00:02:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rcVQ1vFAY
kudos, by the way, S.D. on winning the Mad Bull writing contest at Portland Studios. I enjoyed your entry!
[...] made fun of Twitter publically in a Rabbit Room post a few weeks prior to joining up myself. Can you say “hypocrisy” with less than 140 [...]