Spent all day in meetings about the proposed ‘Bad Bank’ and kept wondering what their uniform might look like.
havent signed tonys card yet, can’t think of anything funny to put
Maybe it’s an age thing; perhaps I’ve already crossed that subtle threshold after which you become unable to understand the appeal of new fads – but I don’t understand the purpose of Twitter. The spoof tweets allegedly from the men currently crash landing the British economy are funny because of the frighteningly plausible, Pooteresque banality of their thoughts. The tweets of a nobody, however, lack such saving irony.
There’s a fine line between spontaneous and knee-jerk, between wit and bigotry, between the simple statement of fact and the simplification that distorts the truth.
We live at a time where politicians clash horns using sound bites and real policy is rarely debated, where newspapers and other media channels uncritically repeat information known to be false (“we only use ten percent of our brains”, “hair and fingernails continue to grow after death”, “house prices always go up in value”). It’s an era uniquely rich in data about the natural world and yet culturally we lack the critical facilities to evaluate this information, making us ripe pickings for every charlatan who appears on television dressed as an expert.
In such an age, do we really want our thoughts to be restricted to what can be expressed in 140 characters?