oct 14
2008
Twits on Parade
It's no shocker that The Weekly Standard doesn't like Twitter, but their analysis is less fuddy-duddy than you think: Twits on Parade.
5 comments
Also, that's gotta be the first Weekly Standard headline to reference a Rage Against the Machine song.
posted by Rex at 3:26 AM on October 14, 2008 
Well, there was that weird story by Hinderaker earlier this year, "Fuck You, I Won't Do What You Tell Me: The Quixotic Second Session of the Roberts Court."
posted by stevemarsh at 8:00 AM on October 14, 2008
Holy shit, I couldn't make it through the smug. Unless the lass 25% had a sudden tone change, it seemed pretty 'fuddy-duddy' to me. I hated Twitter as much as anyone before I used it, and normally I sympathize with people who hate it, but jesus what an asshole. All he was talking about was the Julia Allison aspects of Twitter, not the actual cool uses of it; the @reply conversations, the impromptu organization of IRL meetings, and the potential to get to know people better. Maybe if his attempt to use it wasn't "purely clinical" he could do some better research and be better at his job as a writer. And hating bloggers? Get the fuck off my Internet.
posted by BradOFarrell at 10:35 AM on October 14, 2008
I guess that I was expecting it would be something that rants about the form (something like: "this is ridiculous time-wasting" or "can you believe these freaks believe anyone cares about what they're doing right now") -- like, truly clueless stuff about Twitter.
Instead, it was basically a rant about the content. I guess that I can sympathize with that argument, at least to some degree.
(But of course he does overlook one formal element -- you can always unsubscribe from someone whose content sucks.)
posted by Rex at 12:08 PM on October 14, 2008
Yeah, but that's not REALLY the content. Really, who posts "I had a ham sandwich and it was so good!"? Only people making fun of Twitter and creepy corporate twitter accounts. That's only how Twitter works in theory, where it takes place in a vacuum.
But in reality it functions more like a giant chatroom, where the members of your own relative chatroom are dependent on who is following who. Sort of like the way Live Journal worked*, except lighter and faster.
* haha past tense
Anyone who thinks blogging is shouting into a megaphone from the rooftops doesn't know what blogging is. Blogs are used as news outlets (Gawker, etc) and they're also used personally, but it's incorrect to assume that people who are using them for personal reasons are treating their life like important news. Most of the people who actually use blogs use them to easily communicate with people they already know, not to become a news outlet. Only old people think the medium is exclusively "like a news paper, except narcissistic."
And his constant harping on how it was unnecessarily 'fast' and 'convenient' was another "old guy red flag." You could really remake that argument for any advance in technology.
"Oh, you're sooo important that you have to have a phone in your pocket so you can call people IMMEDIATELY because it's sooo important that you don't have time to check your pager and go to a payphone."
I'm not getting off his lawn.
posted by BradOFarrell at 12:16 PM on October 14, 2008
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