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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Rockin’ Robin

If you google the phrase "twitter sucks," you get 11.2 million hits. There should be at least twice that number.

If you are reading this, and you "tweet" (the jargon alone makes me want to jam a fork in my throat), you need to understand one important point: you're just not that important. That goes for the frustrated musician slinging joe at the local coffee spot all the way to the President of the United States.

You're not important enough for anyone outside of your immediate vicinity to care about what you're up to at this moment. Even members of your immediate family don't care if they're not at least in the same house as you right now. What my parents are doing six hours away as I type this is of no consequence to me, and I would hope the same would by said by them vice versa.

It's disturbing how the internet has fostered a raging sense of narcissism and megalomania in people from all walks of life.

Here's an example of posts taken from the founder of Twitter. This is spellbinding stuff: "Wow, I just shook hands with M.I.A.;" "Driving to rehearsal;" "Landed in San Francisco. It's foggy and cold." Seriously? This passes for something anyone should care about?

Twitter is a mutation of the granddaddy of web narcissism, the blog. These days blogs are so ingrained into society we hardly consider their origins, but if you think about it keeping a blog is really just a long Twitter post. You're letting the world know what you're up to, and what you think about certain topics. Blogs are Twitter on steroids.

But nobody cared then if Nancy the housewife in Duluth went on an existential rant that Pink Floyd was never the same without Roger Waters, or what she ate for breakfast that morning. And people care even less now that she's concisely pondering the genius of "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking."

Maybe I'm becoming the cranky old guy who waters his lawn by hand (only because of water restrictions mind you) and thinks the music's too loud. Check that, music is never too loud. But I grew up without laptops and cell phones, and without the constant need to stroke my ego by thinking people I've never met, or people I haven't seen in years, are interested in where I'm headed at this point in time.

Hell I still don't see the point in sending a text message with a cell phone when you could, I don't know, use the phone to actually make a call to the person you're texting.

Twitter will blow over as soon as everyone on it realizes how much time they're wasting while they could actually be living. It is possible to get through fifteen minutes without being wired.

I've got fifteen shelves of books in my office that prove that point. And not a single one of them has an I/O port.

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