While I have never felt at ease with cell…I mean mobile (sorry Neil) phones, the lure of the ipod is like a siren song for me. It doesn’t matter that you feel slightly drone-ish traveling in a bus with everyone wired to ipods. Then again, if Obama is so smitten with his Blackberry maybe it is time for me to reconsider on that front…hmmm
Similarly, after initial resistance, Facebook has drawn me into its thrall…and I am finding it a wonderful way to communicate with everyone around the world. For all its narcissistic overtones, blogging also strikes me as a better form of release than bending the ear of another drunk at a bar (with less prospect of being punched in the nose too). But my connection with these new technologies is leaving me feeling increasingly conflicted and the battle-lines have been drawn (or at least the boundary has been defined) with the issue of “twittering”.
I am not really sure about it so I will shamelessly cite from wikipedia (which I am always telling my students not to do) to tell you that:
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default).
So twittering can take place via SMS or the twitter web-site or other applications, allowing you to shoot out one or two sentence messages to all and sundry from the cell phone or on the web (oops…sorry I meant mobile). Sort of like a group email that lets your friends, or anyone on your subscription list, know what you are doing at any particular moment. It is aptly titled “micro-blogging” and works around the simple question of “What are you doing now?”. I suppose it is not dissimilar to having constant up-dates from your profile page on facebook.
. Given that I have embraced both Facebook and blogging, my aversion to ‘twittering” is perhaps somewhat hypocritical. It has certainly been embraced by all manner of unexpected bodies and individuals. I went to the home page of the University of California San Diego the other day and was gob-smacked to see that you can sign up for news of UCSD activities on their twitter site. Even the dinosaurs of the Republican Party appear to have taken to the new mode of communication. This was all the more surprising that McCain had to admit during the last presidential campaign that his wife took care of his email and internet communications. But there you are, in this new era the member of Congress with the most followers for their twittering is…the Senator from Arizona. So, come on down…John McCain. He does concede, to be fair, that he gets some assistance with his pearls of wisdom. An article from Chris Lefkow of AFP observes:
The 72-year-old McCain is an infrequent Twitterer and acknowledges getting a little assistance. "YEs!! I am twittering on my blackberry but not without a little help!" read one recent message.
McCain's missives range from dismay over a rash of injuries to members of his hometown NBA team, the Phoenix Suns -- "steve nash hurt? amare too! what now for the suns!" -- to concern over spending in the economic stimulus bill. "$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi - how does one manage a beaver?" he asked.
In the aftermath of the Obama address to Congress one of the intriguing tidbits that came to light was the fact that the chamber had been alive to the sound of twittering (sort of like the Julie Andrews tune from “The Sound of Music”). And many of the members were caught out with their excessive (and, one might offer, inane) “twittering”. One Democrat was reportedly chastised by her mother for twittering during the President’s speech while Texas Republican Joe Barton grumpily observed that there was a basketball game about to start on the espn2 channel “for those of you that aren’t going to bother watching Pelosi smirk for the next hour” in reference to the Democrat Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The sudden realization that this was posted for all the world to see (as we would have said in high school “Der Fred”) led to a rapid retraction with the disclaimer: "Disregard that last tweet from a staffer."
So what do I have against twittering? Well it seems to be so limited and limiting. An article that I saw about it made the point that people are so being twittering about what they are doing that they are not actually in the moment. It is a form of (further) disengagement from actual personal relations to a form that is mediated through electronic media. Railing against twitter is, of course, ultimately futile. Sort of like King Canute ordering back the tide. It does leave me wondering, however, whether it will sound the death knell for written letters as a form of communication. It is not just the limited range of communication that twitter implies – as if the world has dumbed down to an MTV generation vision of the attention span of one pop song – because there is still the possibility to have more expansive and detailed communication through email. But I fear that it will mean that future generations won’t have that pile of letters from parents, family and lovers that are tied up in ribbon or kept in a shoe-box and when they are opened they are like breathing in the essence of another time and place. Printing out the emails and keeping them isn’t the same either for there is something personal about the handwritten letter. I will admit to being one of the worst when it comes to my scrawled hieroglyphics. I look at the beautifully formed letters of my mother’s hand writing or the cursive (perhaps copperplate) of my father and I am envious that I didn’t persevere long enough to master a beautiful script. When I make notes for my teaching class I more often than not finding myself squinting (and not just because I refuse to wear my glasses) trying to make out the illegible scratching on the paper. While it appears to be a dying craft I was interested to see a recent episode of the NPR show “A way with words” was talking about a book titled Script and Scribble: the Rise and Fall of Handwriting (see the show which deals with the origins of local or family sayings at http://www.waywordradio.org/)
But it is not a generational thing. In that show they actually commented that Superman…I mean President…Obama actually has very beautiful handwriting. And of course this blog is shameless in its support of Obama. Apparently he left a handwritten note at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem during a visit in July of last year. The note was promptly retrieved and copied by the press and there was universal acceptance that he had a very nice writing script.
So it is not just about what we can say in the new technology, the content, but the fact that we will lose that art of penmanship. It struck me as apt when I first heard of twitter that I remembered a song from my teenage years by a group called Middle of the Road called….Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep. The song’s perceptive lyrics go something like this:
Last night, I heard my mama singing a song
Ooh-We, Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep, Cheep
Woke up this morning and my mama was gone
Ooh-We, Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep, Cheep
Chirpy, Chirpy
The lyrics (I use the term loosely) sum up for me the shallowness, the absence of any aesthetic pleasure, which twitter represents. But, just like the song Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep that gets stuck in your head (I challenge you to listen to it and not be humming it for the rest of the day) so it is that twitter will get stuck in the head. Apparently those songs that get stuck in the head create a cognitive or brain itch (the Germans call it ohrwurm, or earworm). Of course the only way to scratch the itch is by constant humming or, in the case of twitter, by…twittering!!! But I refuse to accept that resistance is futile, so I am going to go now and dust off my fountain pen, find some ink and start writing you all letters. Which is not to say you will be able to make out a single word I write, but it’s my form of silent resistance.
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