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?
I guess I see twitter as a combination of social bookmarking sites (sharing cool stuff with people), just letting my friends and wider circle know what I’m up to and asking for information/help/something to do. Enough of my friends read Twitter or my Facebook status now that I can say “I’m bored and have nothing to do tonight” and will get invites to things
Hey Mike! Good point – I guess if you have a critical mass of friends and family using a tool then its use becomes self-evident. Perhaps it is a generational thing after all – I use my blog and delicious to share stuff, email and txt for status updates/requests for information because those are the channels I know my friends will check. As for having nothing to do tonight, well, I can just about remember those days…
It’s odd to think that when I was an undergraduate, I only knew one student who had a mobile phone, no one outside of Computer Science owned a computer and my friends and I considered ourselves to be pretty advanced because we had a land line installed in our student house (no more queuing for the pay phones for us!). By the time I did my postgrad, most of the people I knew had mortgages, pets and children so meeting up tended to be more formal and planned in advance. And I’m honestly not *that* old
Maybe I should give twitter a second chance. Or a first for that matter.
Yeh, you probably should give it a go. If you don’t get anything out of it you can drop it easily enough.