Tag Archives: mark my word: twitter will doom us all

Wired article struck a cord and so I am copying and pasting the whole thing…

Ok. I am not really going to do this. But I just want to do something about this article: Scott Brown’s “Gag Reflexes” in Wired (April 2009). The online edition has a longer title: “Scott Brown on Stand-Up Comedy, Lingua Franca of the Wired World” which sums up Mr. Brown’s theory.

Maybe crumple up the page and eat it. But I already promised my husband that I will refrain from wrinkling up any magazine pages before he’s done with them. (Ok. I am attempting to be funny here. If you read Mr. Brown article, you would understand why I feel exposed, caught in the act of trying to be funny. To earn more currency in this new economy…)

Is it wrong to want to quote an entire article really? Ok. Maybe not 100%. I don’t really care for the examples Mr. Brown gave to support his argument. But the insights sprinkled in-between, those struck a cord.

I am no writer, and I am too tired (not to mention lazy), and here is my journal (i.e. I will do what I damn please), so I am going to jott down sentences that particularly resonate with me, and be done with it: (Thank goodness for Ctrl + C & Ctrl + V !!)

“… everything is ‘material,’ and life is one big writer’s room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one-upsmanship”

“More than that: Everyone must be funny. Because ‘funny’ is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world.”

Always feel this way since I got hooked on Twitter. Sometimes it feels almost like a comedy show writers’ room, the pressure is on to be the next funniest. hence wisest, person in the Twitter stream that you can see.

“Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it’s pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy.”

I absolutely agree with #1. Feeling grateful that someone actually voiced this murky concept so clearly in one single sentence. Everyone is a guru of life, and the shallow shall be deep again. Not so sure about #2 since those are the fundamental tools of storytelling, upon which human history has been, and will be, passed on. What we don’t see in the histories in the past is IRONY and self-awareness, imo, which, well, make intelligent comedies.

Moreover, it has always been my one belief that a great sense of humor indicates a great presence of intellect and tolerance.

And this final quote may sound like an accusation “Gotcha!”

“If the references are flying over your head, no worries: You can zip over to Wikipedia and be back in time for the punch line.”

Like I said, Google is Your Friend! Raise your hand if you have NEVER done this… Thankfully Mr. Brown provided hyperlinks to all the references he cited for the article.

There has been NO way for us common denizens to converse with celebrities. That is, until Twitter opened the door…

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This is Twitter’s stated mission (or designed usage) on its homepage:

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Here is my observation: most of the people are using Twitter, not to keep their social network updated with what they are doing, how boring would that be? but to keep track of what celebrities are doing in real life.

Because they are famous, anything they say seems to carry so much more significance. A one-word Tweet becomes some sort of cypher waiting for you to discover its higher meaning. Their random observations of life are so much more hilarious simply because they are famous — on the Internet, you cannot argue that it is funny because of the delivery. This is NOT Seinfeld. “Newman!”

(Speaking of Jerry Seinfeld. Did you hear that he is going to do a reality TV show about marriage? I bet he and his wife are happier than the lot of us because they have a 24-hour nanny…! So what would his advice be? Become really wealthy and then your marriage life would not be bogged down by arguments about who does more when and what…)

Rainn Wilson. MC Hammer. Luke Wilson. Elizabeth Banks. Jimmy Fallon. Neil Gaiman (he WAS already a celebrity in my household, now with the movie Coraline, he IS a celebrity…), LeVar Burton (of Star Trek fame, Yes, the cool blind dude!, and of Reading Rainbow, eh, fame), Shaq (yes, THE Shaq, under the moniker, The Real Shaq), and I am sure I probably miss quite a few. With some of them tweeting constantly. One cannot help but imagine Rainn Wilson tweeting on his BB in between takes of The Office. Does he show his Twitter stream to his co-stars? Do they suggest to him what he should tweet next? Do they laugh at clever responses back to @RainnWilson?

Yes, responses!

In the Twitterverse, you, apparently, are allowed to “Reply to” these celebrities’ Tweets. And if you are lucky, if your star shines on you, THEY may actually Tweet back @ you. This stuff is what dreams are made of. And the real stuff that the wet dreams are made of? That is when the stars FOLLOW you back.

Then you will be a made man (or woman). You have arrived in the Twitterverse.

Here is my brush with fame today with a 10-foot pole:

Wil Wheaton, Gordi in Stand by Me, and also of Star Trek fame, although he probably prefers to be known as one of the Geek gods, a published writer, and a celebrated blogger (see: The Geek Gods), lives in the Twitterverse (again, see: The Geek Gods).

In one of his hundreds’ of Tweets today, he gushes about The Onion:

“I love the Onion so much, I want to marry it!”

After I alerted The Onion about the raging endorsement, The Onion responded with a ringing rejection:

“America’s Finest News Source Politely Turns Down Marriage Proposal From @wilw”

(My seminal role in this comedic exchange can be proven by the timeline shown in the search result, and of course, this picture).

God, I am a loser…

#Piqqem now has 270 followers…

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It is amazing to see how a Tweep (or, what’s the name for a company/entity that tweets? And Christi on Southwest… is she a Tweep or is the Tweet Southwest’s?) grows the number of followers. I wonder whether there is a 3rd party Twitter apps. out there that tracks number of followers for selected Twitter accounts at the end of each day. Then we can do some trendline analysis, plug in significant events into the timeline, and do some regression.

The power of word of mouth. The tipping point.

#followfriday and/or #fridayfollow

When does it become so big that it stops being effective?

Once again, I wish I were back in Grad School: so many fascinating topics to choose from for virtual Performance Studies. What would Ervin Goffman have said about all this in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life? Maybe nothing. Can Sociology be applied to virtual societies where you don’t see people, rather, you see the texts representing them?

Note to self: Buy lottery tickets. Win. Go back to school.

p.s. Piqqem acquired 3 more followers in the time of my writing this post. Yes, probably not as fast as how some celebrities acquire followers, but still… I am intrigued.

But, wait, there is more!

Note to self: Google is your friend!! When in doubt, Google. Even my 6-yo would say, “Let’s google!” when I cannot answer one of his rapid-fired questions. But as always, beware of what you read if the source is wikipedia. Anyhow, did some googling, and answered my own question wrt. 3rd-party tracking apps. No need to go outside of the house: the Twitter team has thought of that from the beginning. DUH. Check out #hashtags to see what’s being tweeted about right now. And for sure, soon it will be written up in the WSJ. When that happens, you know you need to find the next hottest thing.

Crowd sourcing to beat the market: the new tag “$” on Twitter

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Thanks to Wired, I know now what “$” and “#” mean in Twitter-nese. Yes, I am a N00b…

The enigmatic title “On Twitter, $ Is the New #” serves as a test: If you have to ask, I guess this is not meant for you…

I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about the search.twitter URL until I read the Wired blog. How handy. Now I know why so many Tweets had a “#” within them. Duh.

Vanity search-ers now have a new venue and new obsession also, I guess.

I like how Twitter is explained as a distributed social network rooter in SMS, yet larger than SMS:

“Though Twitter has roots in the world of text messaging, it’s a distributed network. Your tweets are broadcast, and what may feel like a one-to-one communication is actually one-to-many. This enormity of scale has made it easy for individual tweets to blossom into wide-reaching conversations, but it’s also made those conversations much more difficult to follow.”

So if you want to talk about a particular publicly traded company on Twitter, just add “$” in front of the company’s ticker, e.g. $GOOG. And a company is already utilizing this, or at least attempting to. The idea that Piqqem has is intriguing to say the least:

They have “urged Twitter users to adopt the dollar sign tag in order to help it keep track of how people on the web are feeling about a particular company’s stock. The plan is to use that data to beat the market and give more informed trading advice.” Sourcing the wisdom of the crowd.

It is going to be a very interesting experiment: stuff that researches and dissertations are made of, IF they survive long enough to get enough attention.

In addition, I am curious to see how many Twitter followers Piqqem has. As the writing of the Wired blog, there were 185. Now there are 190. No, 191, since I just followed them also.

USAir crashed into Hudson River; Twitter received the first picture of the scene

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This is the title of the blog entry: “U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work“. A Twitterer sent a photo from his iPhone.

This sort of illustrated what I talked about yesterday. I guess THIS itself is a great reason for Twitter… Instead of coming to my blog, or emailing everybody I know, or updating my Facebook status, the first thing I did when I got an email about the news was to log into Twitter and read the messages there. I also Tweeted myself.

(All of this, I think, is made ok by the fact that all passengers are safe and accounted for, otherwise it would be heartless to talk about the role of social media in the face of a tragedy…)

What amazed me is the cause of the crash: Birds!

A flock of birds apparently hit the engine of the plane. Wow. Apparently this happened more often than we think.

ABC news coverage: The plane is completely submerged under the water now other than the tail. Extremely scary to think of, “What if…”

The hero pilot’s name is Chesley Sullenberger, and according to the news report, he even searched the aircraft before he himself left. Lots of people are saying now that this is NOT a plane crash, but a well-executed emergency landing based on an experienced pilot’s intelligent split-second decision which turned out to save all the lives on board. It is refreshing to hear of news where people are praising the airlines rather than complaining about the fees they are charging. On the other hand, I am so glad that Mr. Sullenberger did not leave the airline industry because of the financial difficulties felt by all major airlines.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet…

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Upon learning my having joined the latest phenom which is Twitter, my male co-workers asked me point blank, But, WHY?

Why not just use emails if you want to talk to people you know? Why not use TXT? You can email to an entire group of people if that’s your reasoning for using Twitter (“one to many” instant communication)

Or, is your intention of letting strangers know what you are doing at any given minute? Waiting in line in the grocery store? Watching TRM at airport lounge?

Why? What is the rational excuse for this? Or even, the psychological needs behind this?

Excuses I use for being on Facebook, despite not having lots of “friends” (or Peeps) nor being a teenager, nor leading an active interesting life, cannot even be applied to Twitter: I can share pictures with people that I know on Facebook, only when they want to know; I am not shoving my cute kids’ pictures down anybody’s throat. And my friends may not want to know that I have been up to on a daily basis (for some, perhaps once-a-year Christmas cards have been adequate?) , but if they check my Facbook status, again, only when they want to, they can see that I have been traveling a lot more for business and that my husband is traveling around the world for his own consulting gig.

No. The same rational does not apply to Twitter. So why indeed?

I happened to read an article in Spectrum, the less-techy (and more Wired-like version of IEEE’s publication), in the current issue: “To Twitter or Not to Twitter” by Robert Lucky (I wonder whether he gets teased for his last name a lot…)

(Right off the bat, the author showed his Newbie status by not using the correct verb “Tweet”… But it’s the type of endearing mistakes that anybody over 30 in this day and age could relate to…)

He mentioned his puzzlement over a young speaker’s Tweeting about “waking up in the morning now”. Any sensible (perhaps older person) would ask, “Why would anybody want to know?” And if they want to know, can’t you call them? TXT them?

This new need experienced by the Internet-generation to be connected to the World all the time is intriguing to me, and I doubt that our children ever even stop and ponder at the wonder of this. To them this is part of existence, “I TXT, therefore I am.” The real grown-ups say this now often as a gentle tease, but there is truth in this saying. “I am Connected on the Web, therefore I am.” A life that is not documented is not worth living.

Excerpt from Mr. Lucky’s article:

“Twitter, the social-networking Web site that allows users to broadcast short text messages to a group of friends, has burst into popularity with millions of subscribers. I’m a confirmed e-mail user, but that’s so 20th century. I feel a certain pressure to get with it. So, to Twitter or not to Twitter? I view it as a question for the ages—the ages of the users, that is.

It was my generation of engineers that created the Internet, but it is largely today’s youth who are molding the social connectedness that is coming to characterize cyberspace. These are the so-called digital natives, who grew up with the Internet already a part of everyday life. They’re always online, inhabiting multiple identities, living a culture of sharing and peer collaboration. For them, multitasking is just the way it is. We older engineers built cyberspace, but our kids live in it, and for many of them the technology is transparent and almost irrelevant.

So as a digital immigrant, already an adult as the new culture was forming, I am amazed at what I see. At a recent meeting a young speaker casually mentioned that every morning he Twitters that he has just woken up. Alarm bells went off in my head. I thought about the fact that several scores of people are going to read a message that this guy has awakened. Isn’t this is an incredible waste of time for everyone involved? But a more unpleasant thought also formed in the back of my head—the worry that no one would care that I myself had just arisen. There must be some social consequence that I’m missing. An older acquaintance told me that he had been using Twitter and that after a week he had begun to feel a sense of connectedness.”

Mr. Lucky referenced two cartoons published by The New Yorker 12 years apart to illustrate how things have changed through the years, and how things have not really: these priceless (and thought-provoking) cartoons can be found here:

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” (A dog, sitting at a computer terminal, talking to another dog.) Published in The New Yorker 5 July 1993 by Peter Steiner.

“I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.” (One dog talking to another.) by Alex Gergory, The New Yorker, 12 September 2005.