TMI (n.) – (1) Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, PA that leaked radiation in 1979 one time but is still operational. (2) Too Much Information – way more than you need/want to know about someone.
- Urban Dictionary
Perhaps you’ve heard of Twitter. It’s this neat, online thing where you can write up to 100 words or so at a clip, telling people exactly what you’re doing at any given moment. Letting them know when you’re eating the bestest paella ever, how incredibly, amazingly mind-bending Synecdoche, New York was or how much you wish your life weren’t So. Damned. Crazy!
“Navin just got a fourth generation IPhone and we’re watching old Hawaii 5-O episodes on the subway! McGarrett is baaaadass.”
“I am love love LOVING Belle & Sebastian and the feel of my new suede couch.”
“I just bought energy saving bulbs for the servant’s quarters and am thinking how much we ALL need to go GREEN now!”
I figure anything Bob Vila, William Shatner and MC Hammer does has to be worth trying. And I want to catch the wave, before it peaks and another site comes out allowing only fifty or twenty words, or asking people what they’re thinking about doing, what they’d never, ever do or what they’d like to do but can’t, and totally p3wns Twitter. It also fits into my policy of doing everything Benjamin Netanyahu does.
So I’ve joined, and you can find me at “Phila_Lawyer” (I wasn’t about to pay a Zimbabwean squatter $500,000,000,000.00 for “Philalawyer”). And I’m probably going to write a bunch of stuff for as long as the site remains hot, as long as people stay interested in hearing what other people are doing sitting in traffic (through May, possibly June).
But I’m not just going to write about masturbating. I’m going to write what I happen to think, whatever grabs me in the moment. Because you and I both know, this is important shit. These are turbulent times, and if you don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know what you’re doing, we might not know if what we’re doing is something worth doing anymore. If there isn’t something better we ought to be doing, or a different, faster place where we could learn more about what other people are doing more effectively and quickly… If Twitter isn’t the new Myspace to an emerging, superior Facebook. The race is to instant knowledge, and email just won’t do. What good is it for me to know my buddy Bob is “Taking a dump” once it’s already over? I’ve missed the show, the drama. I’ll never know that connection – that deep, enduring link… That I was standing on the train platform, just reading a Blackberry and yet inextricably, I was also in Kentucky, in Bob’s office restroom, staring at the tile on the floor and sharing the instant of release.
How else would we know boxed Riesling rawks? That Death Cab for Cutie was so, like, super incredibly awesome? Would anyone ever have heard of Dane Cook? I need to tell you, and you need to tell me. And we need to tell everybody else, IINS!
Unless you want to follow everyone you should unprotect your updates.
PL: Something about “unprotected” creeps me out. I’ve somehow come to this point STD free and, well… I’ll fix it, but you can’t fault a man for being uncomfortable with that concept, at least as stated.
Posts like this sicken me, in the best way possible. It reminds me that there are people out there who would post their bowel movements at every opportunity, and worse yet, there are people that would scramble to read it.
It reminds me of Warhol, this post, because you unabashedly point out how shallow this kind of micro blogging is. You tear it apart. Yet you’re using it anyway to your advantage. The difference is, Warhol deconstructed art, and pointed out the commercialization of it, and ever since art hasn’t been taken seriously by the general public. When you take on twitter, you point out it’s ridiculousness of it, use it and people would be inclined to take it more seriously.
I’m seriously torn as to how I feel about you using twitter, especially since I immediately clicked the link to find out about your latest bowel movement. Keep up the good work.
PL: I kind of like it. It allows me to test out one-liners and throw out pithy little things I might be thinking in the car.
Any alleged “New Big Thing” is worth parodying. And milking.
Haha, Page you can call me old (I’m not that old) but I’ll pass. Those websites are a huge invasion of privacy, and worse yet, ruining a future generation’s attention span.
PL: You don’t care how yummy the blueberry pancakes I’m having are?
I think you should’ve just paid the Zimbabwean squatter for the name. Seriously, what’d 500,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars set you back? $3.82USD?
PL: Quiet on that… You’ll kill the joke.
fuck Luke for encapsulating everything that I would like to articulate in this post and yet I’m still adamantly against twitter. Yes, granted that it is a perfect place to test out one liners; the almost textsfromlastnight. An audience that will critique but the gravity of the response is about as audacious as a fucking ladybug its mate on a leaf, sure it may shakes the branch but who’s paying attention? No really I love youtube comments.
From your writing it seems that you have been pushing the envelope from day one. Finding the area where you’re comfortable with entertaining yourself yet not overtly offending the new party you have engaged yourself in. You’ve been testing one liners all of your life don’t think twitter is more fun to do it on. Consequences are still for other people
PL: True. I see no reason to shit on something gratuitously. Where’s the fun in that?
But if you want to see the real leading edge of stupidity, as I’ve noted many times before – read Amazon reviews. Half of them are intelligent, normal reviews. But the other half? Holy shit. It’s clear about 30% of society doesn’t understand satire or parody, or have any semblance of a sense of humor. It’s also obvious 1/3 of this country can’t spell, type or tell a noun from a verb from a preposition. And then you have the people who think moral judgment is criticism. “I was disgusted by the jokes in this book!” What does that give to someone interested in the book? How does it help? It’s nothing more than a narcissistic yawp.
Really, pick any book and read Amazon reviews. You’ll lose all hope in the American education system.