Apr
30
Twit-Casting Your Face Pod?
April 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment
[or, "How to be Cool in the Modern Age"]
My husband likes to joke as he is fiddling with his iphone that he is “twit-casting his face pod” – an absurd self mockery, but disturbingly accurate. Gone forever are the days when just having a Facebook page was enough.
When I first encountered Twitter I found it to be asinine at best. Micro updates? Who wants to broadcast every other thought that runs through ones head and who wants to read that stuff? What I failed to realize at the time is that Twitter is the perfect app for the modern brain. It’s instant gratification, quick, easy and totally voyeuristic. Even if you have never watched a reality show, our collective human brain machine is tainted forever by the psychology of anti-privacy and lurid shamelessness.
And then there’s business. Twitter is the ultimate marketing tool. It’s a juicy information injection to the masses, and it’s free. I knew I was witnessing an evolutionary jump of the information kind when I realized I was getting my news from Twitter, my humor, my astrology, and my husband’s personal messages to me (“Do you have so many tweeple friends that you’ll even see this: what time are we meeting 2night?”). Furthermore, I found today’s LiveWires literary reference from Twitter when someone re-tweeted this: “@Hodgman is doing his audio book just by holding a microphone up to a kindle.” Audio book via kindle? How funny is that? Very.
John Hodgman is a really hilarious comedian and he is also an author, but I had no idea he was an author until I saw this tiny squeek of micro news. The result is that I am now about to order his satirical almanac.
Go go gadget internets.
Now, as an antidote, here is a piece from the glorious Mark Morford on why Facebook and the like are going to steal your soul…
The vampires of Facebook
Could it actually be dangerous to connect with everyone you ever knew?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
In psychic workshops, they teach you all about cords.
Cords that bind. Cords that connect. Cords that can invigorate as well as consume, excite your spirit and yet also leech life from your very soul, cords made of simple psychic energy that run like invisible cables straight from your heart and your mind and your various energetic G-spots straight out to the world, and back again… [the rest, here]