Twitter fascism

There's nothing wrong with Twitter itself, its users or its providers. What is my problem with this phenomenon? Why am I such a curmudgeon? Without a doubt, there is a lot of hype around Twitter. A hype is nothing but a meme pandemic. It's easy to get infected with Twitter these days, maybe it is a mutation of bird flu. Let's take a closer look.

The term for a 140 character text message in Twitter is "tweet". Memes love tweets. The barrier to twitter is low, because a tweet consists only of a few words. We don't talk about the content here, remember that memes are oblivious about what they transport. So the cost is low. What about the effect of a tweet? You immediately reach a huge audience, at least all people who follow your channel, potentially more. Memes love to spread as wide as possible. This is why Twitter is so successful, it guarantees to spread information wide and fast. The ratio of recipients by cost is tremendous. It's just another gear shift in the memetic rat race.

So Twitter is very helpful in efficiently spreading memes. How about the long term consequences? A tweet is just a line of text, it's hard to put complex information in a tweet. It's all about speed. Condense the information to a few words and off you go. Twitter lowers my attention span. It fucks with my brain. I want to be able to analyze and understand complex systems. It's only logical to assume that twittering produces bird brains.

So by losing context and lacking coherence, meaning potentially gets lost. This is what I dislike most about Twitter. Tweets are potentially ambigious due to their briefness. Is the benefit of speed bigger than the loss of meaning? Just a few days ago the weekly (sic!) german language newspaper "Die Zeit" had a great article about a related issue, the demise of newspapers all over the world. Newspapers just can't compete with the internet, it's too fast. So what do they do? They desperately started to blog and podcast. And now they also twitter.

This is what I call fascism. You just have to twitter these days. Twitter is so new, we really know nothing about its consequences or even what it is good for. We twitter because everybody else does. It's about fear, if I don't jump on the Twitter wagon now I won't be able to catch up later. I wonder what's next. What's the sound of a Kolibri?

If you think I'm not doing Twitter justice, please help me. I would love to understand if there was another side to it that has escaped my attention. But for now, my advice is to subscribe to a newspaper today. It seems to be an anachronistic thing to do, but I'm really afraid to live in a world of meaningless hyperspeed news and wading through bird droppings. And if you think Twitter is not really applicable to the distribution of news, that's just what they say it's about.

Having said that, expect me to promote my very own Twitter channel here before the end of the year. I'm just a feeble hypocritic meme host myself.