xocea

Must… vent…..can’t…. stand it. So many twits tweetin’ twash!
I can’t wait until Twitter is relegated to the category of laughable historical meme. Can we kill this little blue bird already? At the very least there needs to be a cultural shift that scorns anyone whose tweets aren’t links to TED talks. Sure, twitter illustrates how humans are social creatures… in the most ridiculous way imaginable. Don’t get me wrong, if there’s a tweet of value I’ll knowledge it, but the vast majority out there are just micro-narcissistic Twash that simply takes up the time and bandwidth of everyone involved. I can literally hear the gears of society’s progress grinding to a halt as the world takes every other minute to tweet about the minuscule nuances of our lives. How absurd it will all seem in retrospect, once the novelty curve has worn off and everyone realizes that they really don’t have anything valuable to say and should get back to actually doing things. In all honesty, it’s the genre of micro-blogging itself that is to blame and it’s likely not going anywhere soon. Status updates are the same thing. Twitter is just the catalyst of the embarrassing trend.

Ah, that feels better. Off the chest. Back to work. Bring on the fail whale.

It’s Twitter trash and I’m sick of it. I came up with this term while thinking about how sick and tired I am of those pointless tweets that serve no purpose other than to feed the micro-narcissism of the poster.

It’s a short life, and it’s an increasingly fast-paced and busy life. Time and mental bandwidth are at a serious premium. The last thing I need to read about is how bad your breath is in the morning or what your baby’s puke looks like. Tweets – or any micro-blogging, life-streaming, persona-feed should do one of four things. It should (1)inspire, (2)inform, (3)educate, or (4)entertain. If your life-feed isn’t doing any of those things you’re spewing Twash, and Twashers are a huge headache – the online equivalent of (insert popular social outcast paradigm here). Twitter whores are very often the most obvious perpetrators.

This relates to one of my favorite subjects – the social psychology of technology – and the logical extension of an observation I made about two hours into discovering Friendster in 2004. And that comes in two parts:
1) Social software will take off because it taps into the inherent narcissism of our culture, and the absurd assumption that people have along the lines of, (using prissy whiny voice here) “I’m special and the world needs to know what I’m doing.”
2) There is a novelty curve to everything in life, and that is excruciatingly apparent with social software. People discover it and go nuts, exploiting it and using it in the most absurd of ways until we’re all eventually rolling our eyes and nauseated by the over saturation of it.

I think it was Nicholas Carr who first made the observation that “The great paradox of ’social networking’ is that it uses narcissism as the glue for community.” Reading that quote was a huge vindication for me because it so eloquently summarized what i was observing around me.

Come to think of it we’re going to need another term after Twitter goes away. So how about ‘Fwash’, which is feed trash. After all, life is becoming one long feed of information.

But on another note, this relates to techno-narcissism in general. Idunno about anyone else, but the idea that I’m unique or special any more than anyone else is a paradigm an thought pattern I try to avoid like the plague. I’m not saying my brain doesn’t try to think those things, after all I’m human. We pop out as pure 100% narcissism, and only through time and experience do we learn that the universe does not revolve around us. It may never be extinguishable completely, but IMHO it’s our responsibility to minimize this inherently human tendency to feel special.

disclaimer: (1)I do acknowledge the irony of posting a rant about narcissistic behavior on the net but it’s also incredibly cathartic and that sensation overrides my aversion to narcissistic impulse in this case. (2)This post was hasty and may involve fragmented logic, poor punctuation, or incorrect grammar.

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Yakow what, you can take a $700 a-month apartment, and add great friends, a few cheap bottles of wine, a pile of steaks at 4.99/lb., and the best intentions, and create the best things this life has to offer. And if that’s not the case, then I’m completely out of my mind. Salude!

When Joe Frank speaks about something that speaks to you, he sounds profound, but when the subject does not speak to you, he sounds absurd, laughable, melodramatic… This observation seems to illustrate the weak impressionability of our minds.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of JF that I do like, but I found the monologue on power at the beginning of this show did not speak to what i believe to be good, true, real, right, and rational, and so what I heard seemed uninspiring and shortsighted.

My eyes rolled painfully, but I imagine (and know) some people who would probably lap it up like religious zealots at the trough of faith, or gluttonous cats would a river of creme…

- Here’s the show
- Here’s an old article about JF from Salon.com

Exactly….
Ok, I get it….I even found it interesting…for ten minutes. Then the novelty of digital narcissism wore off(like all social media) and I immediately felt absurd for even assuming anyone gives a damn what you just had for lunch or how silly your baby’s hair looks today. If you really feel compelled to tweet – or update your status for that matter – you should have something useful(educational, inspiring, informative) to say or point out. It’s a short life, and mental bandwidth(not to mention time) is increasingly scarce… So think before you tweet, and stop indulging the fantasy that someone wants to know trivial information about your life. I think I’ll start a campaign against useless tweets. Time to take out the “twash.” (shakes old man fist and jiggles jowls) =).

seriously though…