Don’t you hate Twitter? All those people, twittering away, typing all that rubbish, telling people about their lives as if any of us are interested.
As if anyone cares what they ate for lunch today or what they’re watching on TV or what they think about So You Think You Can Dance. Isn’t it just rubbish?
Of all the modern social trends I find personally offensive, Twitter has the greatest direct negative impact on my day-to-day life. All the banality. All those people being so dull.
I spent seven hours the other day just reading random people’s Twitter feeds and I can assure you that in all that time, not one person said anything worth reading.
It was so boring, it was all I could do to keep going for seven hours, and you don’t want to know the kind of mental anguish I went through when I started again the next morning.
All the people whose Twitters I spent all that time reading have no lives whatsoever.
Thank God there are people like me to expose their vacuousness with well-crafted indignant articles.
What’s happened to us? What does it say about the modern world that so many of us spend so much of their time typing mindless rubbish about themselves, completely ignoring the fact that I am not interested in it? I mean, really, have we lost the ability to really connect with real people? When did we decide that “Tweeting” was a legitimate substitute for genuine human contact?
When did we get away from simply talking to each other?
Nobody talks anymore; certainly not to me, anyway. Sometimes, in fact, people go out of their way to not talk to me. Today I came in to work and started up a conversation about how awful Facebook is, and suddenly everyone had run back to their desks. Sad, it was, seeing all these people such slaves to their “online social networks” they couldn’t spare the time for conversation.
And remember when people used to write? Not on the internet; that sort of writing is objectively useless – but write letters? What happened to the art of writing letters? Of sitting down with a fountain pen and writing long, detailed paragraphs about the interesting things that were happening in one’s life?
And oh, what interesting things we wrote about! It was a golden age, when all our thoughts, words and movements were filled with such weighty import that we almost collapsed under the weight of our own fascinatingness.
Not like today, when young people are in danger of floating away, so filled are they with the helium of idiocy.
It seems that “human interaction” is a dirty word these days. In fact, it’s two words, not that young people today would know that, seeing as how they’re all completely illiterate and innumerate, with their iPhones and their MMORPGs and their roflmao cheezeburger kthxbai.
All this networking, it rots the brain. Children these days aren’t taught the three Rs, they’re just taught how to log on and download and cyber-bully and such nonsense. Back in my day, we didn’t cyber-bully. We had the work ethic to bully people in person.
It’s the arrogance of these “Tweeters” that really burns me up. Just who do they think they are? What devilish spirit of presumption has possessed them to the extent that they feel justified in transmitting their every thought to the world? How dare they strut about updating us all on the progress of their meals, their new book, their cat’s ulcer. What gives them the right to tell us about themselves?
Where, in short, do they get off?
I don’t remember asking to be bombarded with the mundane updates of a day in the life of this imbecilic young battalion, their scattergun thoughts vomiting from their underdeveloped, alcopop-addled brains like a sort of boring online Tourette Syndrome.
Given this, I think it is fair enough that, when these people I have never met post tidbits of their activities for the information of their friends, I take it as a personal insult. It’s a lot like the whole mobile phone thing. I never asked people to talk on mobile phones in public places where I happen to be; how unbelievably self-centred of them to think they can do so with impunity.
And that’s the key to the whole issue: self-centredness. In the end, what we have here is an entire generation brought up to think it’s OK to express themselves in any way they choose via new media, without any regard to how I might feel about it.
Just how up yourself can you get?
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