Carol at her very interesting Missoulapolis blog broaches a subject that intrigues me – tweeting. She references another blogger (making this a blog circle-jerk) who says that, oh my gosh, President Obama doesn’t write his own tweets.
I would be so disappointed if he did. I find nothing in our society more illustrative of our shallowness than the tweet culture. I once thought of them as haikus, a form of poetry. People were compressing large thoughts down to a few ethereally transmissible words. Since I am not capable of reading or writing poetry, or of compressing thoughts, I thought that the twitter culture was a good thing, or at least would lead to some useful literature.
Of course it’s not and hasn’t led to anything interesting or useful. It’s pop culture made even poppier and banal. There is only one further step downward – the elimination of language as a vehicle for complex thought, or Wordspeak.
Piece of Mindful 
Tweets, blogs, AM radio, internet cafe, wherever; our culture has become so ephemeral and segregated that thoughtful exchanges, honest debate and big ideas hardly have a chance to coalesce. Business has identified a target segment for every interest, every race, every ideology. Once the psycology of each segment has been profiled, it’s like a large milking operation, only the milk and the cash gets to comingle somewhere way further down the supply chain. Each (cash) cow has headphones and its own play-list. The pieces keep getting smaller and smaller.
On the bright side, new languages are evolving, even as “large thoughts” are atomized. Why dismiss poetry? It is an anti-tweet. Like most artforms, it has the power to live on through centuries of madness.
This makes organizing with the goal of creating a movement with critical mass so diffucult. Even the most gifted pop personalities, however well funded, with digital media all-in, only influence tiny slivers of society at any point in time. Some insects have longer lifespans.
Our world, our challenge.
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I don’t dismiss poetry, not for a second. I just can’t digest it well, and certainly can’t write it. Why fight it.
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The ones who make good tweeters are the people who have who usually have trenchant observations anyway, like Mickey Kaus. Joe Blow tweeting? Not so much.
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