Today’s post is going to be a little smug. I can’t help that, but I think there’s a cautionary tale here worth telling.
I thought that Twitter was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever heard. I was introduced to it pretty early, when it was still largely based around SMS, and the pitch was “tell people what you’re doing right now”. (At this time, Twitter business cards had “handing you my business card” written on them; I don’t know if/when they dropped that gimmick.) Now, this is really stupid. As Lore Sjöberg put it:
I think one reason Twitter leaves me unsatiated is that it asks the most boring question possible: “What are you doing?” Call up a friend and ask them what they’ve been doing lately and you might get an interesting response. Ask them what they’re doing right now and you’re almost guaranteed to get a boring answer: “Eating lunch.” “Thinking about doing some laundry.” That’s because if they were seducing a Nobel Prize laureate or rescuing a baby from a burning submarine, they wouldn’t have answered the phone.
So, why is Twitter such a big deal? Because the official line was a big fat lie. Twitter is a combination distraction engine, provider of the illusion of human connection, and effortless way to yell “look at me”. It’s blogging for people for whom writing long, self-indulgent articles is too much work.
Ahem.
Too Clever
It’s an interesting question as to whether or not the Twitter folks understood what they were doing, or not. Did they grasp the appeal of their thingy, and push it with their questionable conceit because “distract yourself with an endless stream of easily-digestible information, and express yourself in barely-literate grunts, you sub-mental chimp” wouldn’t have played well? Or did they just stumble into something?
At any rate, I attribute my failure to see Twitter’s potential impact to being too clever; I could see that the official story made no sense, and therefore assumed the product would fail. That’s right: Too trusting, and too clever. That’s me. Too wonderful for my own good.
Don’t make my mistake. Don’t listen to the official explanation for things; look at them for yourself, and reason about them on that basis.
Stuxnet
In that connection, and I’m just saying, but doesn’t it seem that an awful lot of very specific information is floating around about the impact of the Stuxnet worm?
