Thursday, June 09, 2011

Twitter-Tweet and Twitter-Dumb

The other day my daughter Alice said something I found very astute. “If there is so much technology why are there still so many stupid people?” Granted, her choice of words may sound harsh but when you think about it she’s right on target.

With the continuous growth of the internet and the tools available to anybody with a computer we have access to more information than ever before in history. If you are missing some tidbit in the personal encyclopedia residing in your brain it only takes a modicum of perseverance and know-how to fill the gap. Why, just now, in a matter of seconds, I was able to find out the rainiest month of the year for Bora Bora is January when they average 18.6 inches of rain. Will I ever truly need to know that? Probably not, but if it is that easy to obtain a fact so obscure there really shouldn’t be any excuse for being ignorant about things of most any kind.

At least that is the way it should be. There is still the problem that not only can anyone with a modem find information on the World Wide Web but anyone with a modem can also put information on the World Wide Web.

(Short digression: Have you ever noticed it takes longer to say the abbreviation of World Wide Web, www, than it does to say World Wide Web? Saying the initials requires nine syllables while saying the actual words requires just three. My personal best saying “World Wide Web” is 0.8 seconds while my best for “www” is 1.2 seconds. Yes, I timed myself.)

I was once told there are more distinct pieces of information being created each week than would have existed in a decade at other times in human history. The thing to remember is many of today’s distinct pieces of information pertain to Kardashians.

I was once given advice by someone in the entertainment industry saying I just needed to get my stuff on YouTube to get discovered. My response was they make filters to keep adult material off your screen but not to shield you from sheer junk. Being on YouTube does not guarantee being discovered when the discoverers have to wade through thousands of hours of cats being painfully cute and skateboard dudes being painfully pained.

I guess the answer to my daughter’s question lies in the fact that no matter how advanced and amazing technology gets it is still used by human beings and we are very flawed creatures.

As a person who refers to himself as a humor columnist I would be drummed out of the corps if I didn’t spill a little more ink in the matter of Anthony Weiner. Here is a man who had gained the respect of many caring, intelligent people. I didn’t always agree with him but I really liked his passionate fighting for what he believed in. How does he use one of the most immediate and pithy ways to communicate? Does he re-state the battle cry of his political raison d’etre? Nope. Does he call to task the others in the legislature for their short-sightedness? Not so much. He uses Twitter as a purveyor of puerile pornography.

While I am not in Mr. Weiner’s league, my use of technology isn’t all that venerable. I do not use the vast amount of technology at my fingertips for high aesthetics and/or contributing to the greater good. Mostly I just want to be entertained. All the favorites on my internet browser are either sports or humor sites. I have a Twitter account, but the only things I have “tweeted” are musings and whinings. The people I “follow” with interest are Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, and Alec Sulkin (a writer for Family Guy) who use their 140 characters to be funny and not much else.

One of my very favorite technological tools is really one of the most basic, e-mail. E-mail is perfect for the timid. It is a way to communicate with or ask questions of others without being face-to-face or even very insistent. If I call you some contraption on your desk or in your pocket makes an interrupting noise and requires your attention right now. E-mail allows the recipient to respond at his own convenience. This also means I am at his mercy. One person I e-mail with some regularity answers in one of three timeframes, either within the hour, at the end of the week when catching up on all correspondence or never.

Christopher Pyle loves the self checkout technology at grocery stores because it removes one more human interaction from his life. You can e-mail him (he’ll probably answer) at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

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