I love Roald Dahl and his stories. One of my favorites is The Twits - Mr and Mrs Twit are two ugly, smelly, nasty people, who spend their lives playing nasty tricks on each other.
I am beginning to think that Twittering is exactly that. A nasty trick played on me to make me devote large amounts of my time following the fire-hose of digital junk.
So I have tried and in the past discarded Twitter more than once. But I think i finally found a reasonable use for it. Following some conference material. But I hasten to add that you really have to be able to understand the context of the posts. So making that work is just too hard for the average person. It also still rests on the basis that I find questionable for all Social Network outputs - which is that the mass consciousness is reliable as the definer of "truth" or reality. We know how well that kind of thinking served Athens and then Rome.
So I will somewhat scale back my vehement criticism of Twitter as being a form of digital diarrhea and say that within reason it can have value. It just doesn't necessarily work for people like me.
Cheers
Thanks for this post. It's hard to find criticism for "social networks", but I am fed up with brainless enthusiasm for anything associated with "web 2.0". Quote marks, again, since all this euphoria would have been better spent on Geocities in 1997 (on or something else before that, but I was not a Netizen before 2007).
ReplyDeleteIt's also hard to believe there are no comments on the blog. I appreciate what you write: not servile, not harsh without reason, "fair and balanced", unlike some canine-named TV channel.