Posts Tagged ‘ Twitter ’

I sold my soul to Twitter

In a more elegant time I might have made a pact with the devil so that I could play a mean slide guitar riff. In our world I have to choose between facebook or twitter, both of which have the devil licked when it comes to controlling your soul.

Endless dialogue rages on in both places, people post, and post, and comment and star, and like, and retweet and post irritatingly positive quotes from dead people who never had accounts on either service.

“Why do we do all this?” you might reflexively ask yourself. Or if you are one of the few who stand in the sidelines, you might be screaming “What are you narcissistic morons doing?”

The truth is it is more probable than not that you are actually already on facebook now, playing in the walled garden, and you only stumbled on this because someone posted it. That is the big ugly fact of facebook, it won, it has done what AOL tried and failed, it has created a curated internet. And we use it simply because experiencing the web through the lens of our friendship network is either more useful or fun, I am not yet sure which. Will we ever know which of these is the truth?

If facebook is still here in 10 years then I would err on the side of usefulness, otherwise,… well it was an entertaining way to spend 100 billion dollars.

As for me I have walked over to the twitter side, it is even more shallow and narcissistic than facebook, with a cult of personality culture, and frivolous follow and unfollow ethic.

But there is a certain kind of honesty to the open shallowness of twitter. No one on twitter thinks it is anything other than narcissism, and they still read things that don’t exist only inside twitter. People come back to twitter for a moment of entertainment, but they are not trapped there, it is a game, it doesn’t have your photo albums, or your videos, or your friend’s birthdays or farmville. It is just people talking, joking, bullshitting, flirting, and desperately trying to be famous or sell stuff.

So I sold them my soul, I don’t need friends, I need followers.

2012
05/17
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CATEGORY
Mediamash
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Osama Follows Your Tweets

Even if you have been living under a rock with Osama Bin Laden you probably know that he is now dead. Apparently, one of his wives helped identify him as a priority target as the strike team that will not be acknowledged stormed through his secret compound. Sadly, Bin Laden lived his last days without access to the Internet, so if he was ignoring your friend request on Facebook it really wasn’t personal. It numbs the mind to think of all the LOL Cats and free music that he denied himself in order to avoid leaving a digital trail that would betray his location. Ironically, it was exactly the absence of Internet access that created enough suspicion to identify his hideaway. Had Bin Laden been kicking back surfing the web, he may have been able to avoid his premature expiry as his neighbor Sohaib Athar was merrily tweeting a complaint about the attack helicopters hovering over his secret compound. However, this would have only helped him if he had been explicitly following Athar’s tweets, or if Athar was using GPS based location mapping for his tweets. So while you are all complaining about Apple and Google grabbing too much of our data, just take a moment to think about that poor little terrorist, who kept us all entertained for the last decade, and how he might have at least gone out with a decent chase scene if he had just embraced the end of privacy.

2011
05/03
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CATEGORY
Mediamash
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