Monday, February 23, 2009

On topic? Probably not.

If you pay attention to whatever crap I spew (and my overinflated ego tells me you do), then you may have found out I hate twitter and said being forced to tweet was the cruelest assignment I have had so far in college. Of course, that is an exaggeration, but I do have a hostility towards twitter.

Krzys is obviously excited to see his students express their progression in several forms and twitter is one of the more convenient ones. I imagine at the beginning of twitter that it was mostly used for silliness such as:

"MyNameIsEd: Im about to try a McGangBang. Pray for my health"
2 minutes later
"MyNameIsEd: God help me."

This sort of stuff is asinine and I actually have no problem with it. Its mindless and fun. I actually even find the tweeting with my fellow students pretty fun and keeps the work lighthearted. I was beginning to see why twitter is widely used.

Today, Rachel mentioned I can follow the Economist on twitter. Whenever I watch some cable news I see some pundits plugging their twitter as a way to keep up with the news. I guess this is a way to make twitter more substantial and I guess it could work great in some situations but this is what actually bothers me.

It reminds me how newspaper articles have shrunk in size, how news network try to be entertaining, and how Time seems to be written at an 8th grade level. Does one really need rapid fire news? 140 Characters aren't enough for anything resembling analysis. We need denser and more thought out reports not the news equivalent of a big mac. That is what bothers me about twitter. Its really another symptom of a culture that is making everything disposable.

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad someone else feels the same way. First they add a ticker on the bottom of the screen constantly streaming headlines and now they can spit out blurbs on twitter. Can no one read a full news story anymore? We should bring down the news networks and make everyone switch back to newspapers.

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