My Space, Facebook and the current crown prince of social media, Twitter, are sucking up bandwidth left and right. Between blogging, texting, tweeting and emailing I’ve developed a serious vitamin D deficiency. Is Twitter bringing us all together?
Is the 140 character tweet a cultural step forward, the next mile marker in the transmutation of our culture into one giant organism of instant mass communication? Is Twitter a global catalyst for social activism and digital communal living, or is it another mutation of a behavior that’s undermining our social fabric and weakening our interpersonal connections? I’m just asking.
And don’t get me started on texting. Let your fingers do the talking. Texting is a constant activity. I want to see the numbers on car accidents caused by texting; and I’m sure some dufus has lost his home casting too many votes for some lame-ass lounge lizard on American Idol or some washed-up has been stumbling around on Dancing With the Stars. It must have happened.
All these things push us away from actually meeting someone, touching someone or uttering a complete thought. Does anyone really care if I’m having an intellectual bowel movement? I just washed my car, found a great site featuring organic cotton panties and wasted two hours watching the latest incarnation of James Kirk (although there’s really nothing wrong with that) and felt compelled to tell the world. You know social media has become a rapacious monster to be feared when MSNBC, Fox News and all the traditional media devils jump on the band wagon and start subverting it. I’m just saying…the lack of interpersonal contact facilitated by internet organisms like Twitter makes actually talking to someone on your cell phone feel like a warm rejuvenating hug. Gotta go. I’ve gotta update my Twitter homepage and my phone just beeped…
RSS
Do internet organisms like Twitter really facilitate a lack of interpersonal contact? I don’t think so. I think they actually can increase — get you in contact with people you’ve lost touch with.
I bet when the old telephone was first invented people said the same thing — it’ll inhibit real contact. Of course, it actually is a convenience facilitating real contact.
If you want to find the real culprit in reducing actual human contact, look the the TV. What’s the average number of hours an adult spends watching that passive, momentum killer? In fact, I’m going to blog about it later!