The dagbuzz for 3/17/09: (Ashton, Oprah and Generation Twitter)

Just to reinforce my comment about delivery mechanisms... information will continue to flow ever faster.

Now we can debate whether the flow and velocity of information is a good thing, but He-Who-Twits is a distraction from the real development.

I have a computer programmer friend who argues that the mechanisms have ben in place all along But it appears we are in for some new uses and developments now that it is so f-ing popular.

I too reject the charge of Luddism.

Technology is as good as what it can accomplish. I read, I email, I search, I blog, I ipod, I share photos, I Skype and I Slingbox halfway around the world. All useful, empowering things. Thank you, computer gods.

But I see the cell phone (and its eviler twin, the Blackberry) as a self-implanted RFID device -- the only advantage being that you can deliberately misplace it. So no, I won't be joining the Twit Generation.

I was alerted to dagblog by my close personal friend DF and he commissioned me to write here, in so many words. From what I understand its an extension of TPM?

Maybe just a tip, don't take this personally. But as some simple journalistic advice for dagblog and hoping to perpetuate intellectual merit, and good stories, don't write about Ashton kutcher,  twitter, and Operah.

Semper Fiscalis!

I am a partial Luddite. A Lud, if you will.

Technology is cool if it is useful. But I like my books to have pages made of paper, I like my words to be spelled out--as in OH MY GOD--I like complete sentences with proper punctuation, and I enjoy well-reasoned and well-expressed thoughts that exceed Twitter's maximum character requirement. I understand that language is in a constant state of evolution. But it would appear that we are currently evolving in the diretion of pidgen. And that sux.

I think you've got it, Muerte.  The Twitter phenomenon has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with culture.

Here's a brief story: When MySpace started blowing up, a good friend of mine expressed to me that he didn't understand why it was so popular.  Now, he's very tech savvy.  So, to him it didn't make sense that anyone would care about what MySpace was doing.  It was a web site that seemed to place stricit limitations on what you could do with it.  Why, he wondered, would someone want what basically amounted to a crippled web page without its own domain that you didn't and couldn't own?

With MySpace, I could see exactly why it was so popular.  The web is a collection of technologies with an impressive and flexible feature set.  However, if you're not aware of the breadth of these technologies and conversant in the lingua franca, then you might as well go down to the hardware store and grab a can of spray paint, find yourself a nice blank wall and get busy blogging.  Or put up yet another half-hearted, under-construction page at GeoCities or AngelFire.

MySpace made the personal web page dead simple.  Many other entities, ISPs and web portals being the primary perpetrators, had tried to offer this to a seemingly tepid public.  MySpace took off because it lets people do what they want to do: Have a personal web page that links to all of their friend's personal web pages so that they can exchange comments and pictures and such.  The same can be said of Facebook, which, for a while, was the educated netizen's MySpace.  I think that there's also another factor here, which is that MySpace was a new brand that made itself synonymous with the personal web page at a crucial moment in the expansion of accessibility to the Internet.

Regardless, MySpace was a technological fait accompli.  So is Twitter.  They both are better explained culturally rather than technologically.  It is precisely the cultural explanation and its implications that leave such a bad taste in my mouth and, apparently, yours as well.