It is Official: Humanity Abandons All Self-Respect

When I first heard about Twitter I assumed that it was a novelty act that would soon (mercifully soon) disappear from our cultural consciousness.  Much the way that. . . .well, to be honest, I’m having trouble coming up with a comparison here because it is now apparent that like all too many tragically idiotic human inventions–nuclear weaons, Ann Coulter, monster trucks, Miley cyrus, the Patriot Act–Twitter is now here to stay.

As a result, there are now grown people, some of whom even have a modicum of education, talking with a straight face about how they “Twitter,” sending “tweets” to their fellow “twits.”

Really?  Has it come to this?  This is, of course, one of the specialized functions that popular discourse contributes to our ongoing human effort to engage at a deep and meaningful level with one another and the nature of the universe: it takes terms that were previously used to describe a behavior that was silly and/or reprehensible, and reinvents them with a positive spin, entirely without irony, in order to sell stuff.

Just a couple of years ago, if someone had accused you of “twittering” you would have understood this as an insult.  Often, of course, the term had a distinct gender bias: women were far more likely to be described as “twittering” than men, just as men are less likely to be accused of gossiping even though they do it as much as, if not more than women.  Regardless, if you were described as “twittering” you were being accused of providing light, inconsequential background noise.

Today, “twittering” still means that you are providing light inconsequential background noise–only now this is seen as good thing.

It obviously wasn’t enough that we developed blogging, where any schmuck of schmuckette with an overdeveloped sense of their own importance can fire off ill-considered, intemperate rants (like this one) about the general failure of the universe to shape itself into a giant teat made available for their personal gratification.  Now we have a technology that allows people to fire off ill-considered intemperate rants in 140 characters. . .

Wait, maybe that is an improvement. . .

Think I’m being too harsh?  Here’s how Twitter itself tries to sell you on the need for it, with a quote from Eric Nuzum:

If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.

Or. . .you realize that it really is exactly as ridiculous and stupid as MySpace.

From blogging, to micro-blogging. . .what’s next?  Pico-blogging?  Where you will be attempting to communicate the ratty and fetid state of your soul in only ten characters?

That is so la

Dickhead

Everyone n

I invented

So lonely

It also makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what previously pejorative term will be appropriated next in order to describe the next revolutionary communications tool: Blabber?  Smirk?  Simper?

My top contender for the next killer app that we don’t actually need (and you heard it here first): Drivel.