This may be... whatever, but it strikes me: people who use Twitter, read and write, constantly... every day, many, many times a day, and use it every time they have two minutes free, and often if they don't... doesn't this just have a strong whiff of hyper-activity? The sort of thing we give school kids Ritalin for?
I'm not saying it is wrong, and I have a lot of these addictions myself, but I do think that obsessively skating as fast as you can on the surface of things (140 characters is superficial), in constant anxiety of missing what has been going on for the last hour you were away, indicates a mental state of inability to sit still, and to consider the deeper and less Right-Now-related issues of life.
And intuitively I feel that the very most important issues in Life, The Universe, and Everything are things which do not happen and disappear within an hour or a day, but which have relevance over hundreds, even thousands of years.
For example: what the current president has done today is less important than what he does over his career. And a specific president is less important than the basic beliefs and principles of politics. Which is less important than how democracy works, for example, and whether democracy really is the best form of government, and if not, what is.
Beyond that comes things like what is a good citizen? What is a good human being? Hey, what is a human being?! What's our relationship to the world and the universe? What is my purpose ultimately?
You'll notice these questions become more and more difficult/impossible to give short or simple answers to, and they stretch over more and more time in relevance, and they rise in importance.
Such questions also tend to induce great existential anxiety, which is for real and very uncomfortable, and for this we take pills, or large doses of TV, or Twitter.
Well said my friend.
ReplyDeleteI feel that the very most important issues in Life, The Universe, and Everything are things which do not happen and disappear within an hour or a day, but which have relevance over hundreds, even thousands of years.
ReplyDeleteYou confuse data logging with philosophical pondering.
Captains don't log minutiae such as the weather and other things in the Ship's Log because the daily weather collected from the lifetime of the vessel has some philosophical significance. Same with airplane pilots who log every flight in great detail.
They do it to collect data, because some of that data might be useful later.
Also read about the psychological benefits of stream-of-consciousness recording. There is a feedback loop from your published tweets to the observing faculty of your mind that makes you see yourself as if in a mirror. Tweeting a lot can literally make you a better person.
140 characters is nothing but (as you pointed out) superficial.
ReplyDeleteThe way most people butcher words e.g. UR instead of you are, etc. doesn't exactly constitute reading, nor writing of any description that I know of and attempted to learn.
I often wonder what would happen if these people had a sudden outage of no being able to send a text, a tweet, or even check Face book. I think the meltdown would be hilarious to watch.
As a person who works in the medical field, within the last 12 or so years, I have seen an increase in number of prescriptions for drugs for mental health issues. It doesn't matter if it is for depression, sleep disorders and ADD, etc. One doctor I know has recently joined with some Canadian researchers to determine how something like a smart phone may actually be contributing to the problem. On the heals of the post for decreased attention span due to the net. Interesting.
There are some studies that show that people are losing the skills required to just sit down and do something solidly for a few hours and finish the job. They flit from one thing to another, and it just doesn't allow them to do the big picture things which require a significant amount of immersion. Maybe why we are outsourcing things like programming to India, they are much more attuned to a work ethic of just doing your work at work.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that we will see more businesses restrict the amount of time that people can spend on texting , twittering, face booking etc. These will be restricted to morning tea, etc. Basically you have a set time in which you can eat, socialise etc. Of course there are health and safety implications of not taking a break, so it may be that we revert to only certain activities of a non-computer type being allowed during breaks.
Tweeting a lot can literally make you a better person.
ReplyDeleteIt seems more likely the opposite is true - otherwise you'd do it privately. Everyone thinks their inane thoughts are of interest to the world. Do it in a journal or on your own computer and you might get the benefits.
the meltdown would be hilarious to watch
ReplyDeleteI second that! :-D