#44: The Hot Twitter Bath
I love complaining about Twitter. I could write a weekly email newsletter dedicated entirely to what's wrong with it (I once compared Twitter to a declining post-industrial Rust Belt city). Complaining about Twitter on Twitter is especially fun. Twitter is arguably as awful as its ever been, yet it's somehow still awesome. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's the worst social media platform except for all the others. At their best, any of these platforms acts as a dynamic layer on top of the so-called real world that exaggerates and highlights what's interesting about that world, whether good or bad, and Twitter still accomplishes that task. Facebook exploded in popularity by doing the same for college students in 2004 before devolving into a mixture of escapism, banality, and divisive communication (all of which there's still a huge audience for).
"People don't actually read newspapers, they get into them every morning like a hot bath," Marshall McLuhan said fifty years ago. Newspaper or not, there's always a medium that people use this way—the medium people want to hang out in, not just use, an abstracted public sphere where it feels like stuff actually happens. Between the eras of the newspaper and the internet, this medium was TV, of course. The other day I watched this clip of Chris Rock's first national TV performance, on Arsenio Hall, and remembered how TV used to be full of iconic, unpredictable, awkward moments like the last 45 seconds of this clip. Producers have gradually learned to iron out most of the chaos (I doubt anyone will ever rip up another photo of the pope on a live broadcast), but meanwhile this kind of thing happens all the time on Twitter. Plus, you can actually get in on the action! Even the rare exceptions to my point, like NFL players kneeling during the national anthem last year, were as much Twitter phenomena as TV moments—I never actually saw anyone kneel before a live game and I watch an above-average amount of football.
We are supposedly in the Golden Age of Television (Wikipedia hilariously canonizes this period as lasting from "2000s-present") but that characterization is deceptive, because television isn't really television anymore. There's the long list of cinematic masterpieces like The Wire and Game of Thrones, which stand alone; Netflix and Hulu have meanwhile isolated TV's "anesthetic for modern life" function (here's a pessimistic thread about that). Everything else that made TV the vibrant center of 20th-century cultural life has dissolved into the internet, most importantly its qualities of serendipity and "liveness"—channel-surfing into a Smashing Pumpkins music video, falling asleep watching bad infomercials, stumbling across a rerun of some mediocre show you forgot about, and even watching sports and award shows, for which Twitter has possibly surpassed the TV screen itself in importance. Eugene Wei, writing about the decline of televised NFL football, observes that the internet lets us "extract most of the entertainment marrow and cultural capital of knowing what happened without having to sit through three hours of mostly commercials and dead time." Real-time information travels too fast for TV to keep up. If Twitter is a decaying city, then for all its problems, like New York in the '70s, it's still cooler than the pleasant ones.
Reads:
Bruce Sterling on how the dream of the "smart city" is dead. There is more insight about the near future of cities and technology crammed into this 8-minute read than in much longer efforts by experts who don't primarily write science fiction.
Facebook Should Be Tinder Too: The accelerationist in me wants to see this happen.
Until next time,
Drew