The Road To Hell Is Paved With Tweets

“Let the hate flow through you.”

- Emperor Palpatine

Fuck Twitter.

The American media is presently engaged in a shameless ganghumping of Twitter for its alleged role in stoking the flames of freedom in Iran. CNN, which sucks, has been the most self-indulgent participant in this orgiastic exhibition of pseudo-journalism and minutiae-peddling. Minutiae that may not even be accurate, to boot. Not only is CNN intensively reporting that Iranians are using Twitter to coordinate protests, it is reporting Twitter tweets from Iran as breaking news. And not just tweets. “The most trusted name is news” has also seen fit scour the pages of Facebook and MySpace for newsworthy information generated by users in Iran. Although CNN admits that pretty much none of these stories can be verified, the station continues to report them anyway.

At this point I have one very important question for CNN. What the fuck? I know you don’t have reporters on the scene, but in all seriousness how fucking lazy can you be? If your go-to sources for breaking information on the Iranian shit-show are Twitter and Facebook, then what do we need CNN for when we can just fire up the internet and guess with the best of them? And believe me, it is a guessing game. Tweets that report “eyewitness” accounts of the protests from “Naseem in Tehran” could for all we know actually be coming from Ted in Cincinnati.

As I was reading up on this Twitter bullshit in the New York Times the other day, I happened to notice a piece about good old Ray Bradbury. It turns out that the curmudgeonly old writer, now eighty-eight, spends his days traveling to cash-strapped libraries to help them raise the money necessary to stay afloat. You remember the library, right? That’s that vast repository of books and accumulated knowledge and insight available free to anyone who cares to concern themselves with such things. Although both Twitter and the library deal in information, the library is the exact opposite of Twitter.

Having already realized that the coming self-imposed hell of ours will be arrived at on a road of tweets, upon seeing the article I suddenly remembered Bradbury’s very stark warning in his 1953 futuristic classic, Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s mouthpiece for this prophetic admonition was the Orwellian Captain Beatty of the book-burning fire department. Beatty explains to fellow fireman and protagonist Montag why book-burning is so necessary:

“Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.” (p. 61)

While Twitter is not the only networking medium that lends itself to banality, in many ways it is worse than its peers. Twitter is the only “service” that prominently advertises itself chiefly as an intermediary for the transmission of hopelessly useless information. It is a tower of triviality. Indeed, it appears that most tweets are so unimportant that it would be considered impolite or even presumptuous to send their content via any other means, including text messages, if you can imagine that. In fact, there’s a good slogan. “Twitter: When your words are too unimportant to text.” To text!

When I went to the Twitter website for an explanation as to just what in god’s name those people think they’re doing, I was expecting to read all about it. Silly me. No reading. Instead, I watched a video telling me that the point of Twitter is to ask what people are doing at any given moment in their quiet lives of desperation. I thought, isn’t this just too much information? Twitter was prepared for this question: “No, Twitter solves information overload by changing expectations traditionally associated with online communication.”

Huh?

“At Twitter, we ask one question, ‘What are you doing?’ The answers to this question are for the most part rhetorical. In other words, users do not expect a response when they send a message to Twitter.”

Users don’t expect a response? Then what the fuck is the point of this horseshit?

“On the receiving end, Twitter is ambient—updates from your friends and relatives float to your phone, IM, or web site and you are only expected to pay as much or as little attention to them as you see fit.”

First of all, your average Twitter user doesn’t know what ‘ambient’ means. Second, I don’t know about you, but the only time I really give a shit about what people are doing is when I want to make plans with them. In which case, I call them on the phone. And you know what’s great about the phone? It doesn’t limit what I want to say to 140 characters. One hundred forty characters. As if our language hasn’t been vulgarized enough, Twitter is helping to raze our discourse to the base level of hoi polloi jargon and jive-talking. How did we get to this point where everything is abbreviated, nothing is unabridged, and expediency reigns supreme over substance? I’ll let Captain Beatty handle this one also:

“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending…Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column...

“...Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in midair, all vanishes! Whirl a man’s mind around so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary time-wasting thought!” (pp. 54-55)

I am by no means a Luddite. My problem is not with technology, but with people who use it for harebrained purposes, such as disclosing the utterly insignificant to all those unfortunate enough to receive their vapid tweets.

This month Harvard University released the results of a study conducted on over 300,000 Twitter users (or Twits, as I’ll call them). It turns out that 90% of all Twitter content is generated by 10% of the users. Furthermore, the results showed that a huge portion of Twits use Twitter simply to follow others instead of tweeting themselves. After a lot of number-crunching, the study found that the median number of tweets per user in an entire lifetime is one.

Naturally, this means that there is a relatively small group of staggeringly pretentious douchebags out there who think they’re so important as to subject their toolbag followers to a daily farrago of frivolities, inanities, buffooneries, and outright absurdities. Let’s have a look at some sample tweets, shall we?

“Taking a shit at Starbucks.”

“I really like avocados.”

“Shaving my grundle.”

“Where’s that J I just rolled?”

Brilliant. Anything else you’d like to tell us, you pompous asshole?

“I’m tweeting.”

Go fuck yourself, you philistine.

-Max