Tuesday, April 14, 2009

wait, it does what now?

Twitter is so, well, hawt right now. SHRT. And with anything warm, comes a lot of heat. It's increasingly large fan base attests to it's popularity while blog after blog and comment after comment will lend to many a peoples idea that things have gone a bit far in these "microblogging" times. However, I don't really care to chime in on how I feel, don't feel, or don't even know how (or care) to feel about Twitter, but rather dive into a much deeper, disturbing and clearly way more pressing issue. It's bigger than You, Me--this whole fucking Twitter, micron/nanoblogging thing.

I have never laughed as hard I did on Christmas day when I was about 8 years old. Speculations that the big present under the tree was a Sonic The Hedgehog III Edition of the groundbreaking 16-bit Sega Genesis kept my brother and I up all night gossiping like little girls about which guy we had a crush on, only trade the guys for games we'd buy, play, conquer....you get the idea. Speculations turned out right and before you know it we were racing through space and time with Sonic and Tails trying to, well, do all the fun things you do in video games.

After a few hours of playing, enter my old man, whom, at the time was probably a modest 35 or so years old. He was pretty hip to electronics, walkmans, power tools. I wouldn't say that he had trouble to adapting to new satellite dishes, auto-mated recording on the VCR and even working my uncles advanced copies of Laserdisc's. But Sega may have been out of his reach. He sat there almost hitting us as he whipped the controller back and forth in some weird mental idea that if he pressed over AND moved the controller it would work way easier. He lost. Badly. And he kind of sat there lost, just trying to figure out why a kid would want to pretend to be a mutant hedge hog and collect rings. He was familiar with video games, he liked them, but I think it had just gone past his knowledge. I remember him just kind of muttering about it and asking all sorts of questions when I think it just dawned on him that it was just too far his capacity to comprehend. At 35 he was finally starting to experience technology surpassing him.

Which leads me back to Twitter. I don't hate, nor like twitter. It's too advanced for that. And it's scaring me. I'm a "hip" dude to technology, I hacked an iPhone. But for the first time, and at the way too young age of 24 I feel that finally the state of technology, or what it's beginning to spawn is surpassing me as I'm awkwardly explaining Twitter to my equally bewildered grandma, almost beating her to saying, "I just don't get it at all."

I hope it's just a fluke, and I just can't wrap my head around it, but it's kind of starting to freak me out, man. (Sorry for the rant I'm just sitting around waiting for all this crap to transfer on my hard drive)


5 comments:

-kw said...

I hate vowels!

Andy Collins said...

i was like you when i first heard of twitter...fully didn't understand the point. but now that i've been using it for my online zine, it's actually a very efficient tool. when a new post is made on the zine's site, it udates to twitter which is linked to the zine's facebook and myspace pages, thus updating those pages as well. one post to cover 4 needed updates is a very beautiful thing. plus when you take into account that other users can get the updates directly to their phone, it's a great mass communication tool. all of that being said, i probably wouldn't use it if it was just me wanting to talk about me...i use it purely as a marketing tool.

Anonymous said...

If you don't understand it, you don't need it.

sockrider said...

A couple guys I went to high school with (Paul Bausch & Evan Williams) invented Blogger, then Evan went on to invent Twitter. Go Columbus High alumni!

I'm going to now invent a 4 letter super nano-micro blog site. Only 4 letter words are allowed.

Anonymous said...

me smash computer now.