My early reaction to Twitter

As I might have mentioned, I recently started playing around with Twitter. Sweet Jesus, it's a unique environment. With only 140 characters to play with, it's like swimming in a crowded whirlpool, and having people grab you, yell something in your ear, and get pulled away by the tide.

I'm noticing some various trends among users. I find a lot of them fall into several categories.

There's the celebrities, of course. People famous for being on TV, or in movies, or writing books or whatever. I've heard that 1% of Twitter users are celebrities, but 99% of the other users follow them. Which might be accurate; I don't know. Some celebrities just tweet about their lives. Others try to use their celebrity to promote the things that are important to them, like causes. Or... instagram filters.

Here's a little fact nobody mentions: if you're looking to get more jokes on your feed, comedians are a weird bunch. Many of them will try out jokes on Twitter, but a lot don't seem to want to "waste" them like that - and, really, that's understandable. When you make your living having people pay to hear your jokes, you don't want to give them away for free.

So sometimes you end up with streams from comedians like Iliza Shlesinger (@iliza), who seems to mostly tweet pictures from her Instagram feed. But most often, you get a lot of tweets like "Had a great time tonight, @HeliumComedy in Philly! Thanks for coming out!" or "I'll be headlining at the #ItchyKitty in Reseda tonight! Be sure to stop by! Tickets at the door!"

There are a lot of people who apparently don't have anything to say. All they do is read their stream, and occasionally retweet ("RT") something somebody else has written. They don't tend to add anything to the discussion. But then, just to keep things exciting, I guess, they'll find somebody who looks interesting and poke through their feed. Then they'll favorite or RT a long string of things from that same person, and then, after that brief flurry of activity, I guess they just go back to grazing through their Twitter stream passively, like bipolar cattle.

Trivia: "starbang" is to favorite a lot of tweets in a row (because the symbol for "favorite" is a star, see?). There's probably a similar term for obsessively retweeting somebody else's words, but I haven't run across it yet.

There's also a weird subclass of Twitter users (or maybe even superusers) that seem to have allowed Twitter to take over their lives. They tend to tweet or retweet constantly, and I'm not entirely clear that they do anything else throughout the day.

I mean, I'll tweet some random, semi-funny line every so often, but these people spew unrelated jokes every 15-20 minutes. And then regurgitate a string of retweets, and then back to spewing their own "humor." I guess it's easier than getting a life...

I'm coming to realize that for a good 99% of users, if you follow them, it's best to just turn off the ability to see their retweets. It's just a good policy.

You know all those mindless idiots who believe everything Fox "News" and Sarah Palin spew? Yeah, a lot of them have Twitter accounts. They can be fun for a while - they tend to block you before too long, though. (I wonder if I've been blocked more often than I've been retweeted? That's an interesting question; somebody's got to have an app that'll show those stats...)

There's also a collection of what must be bots out there - programs that just spew whatever tweets they're designed for. There are "users" who just tweet ads for random ezines (I'm looking at you, funnient.com); I'm starting to suspect that the entire ad department for a lot of these ezines is a Twitter user sending out promos for their latest slideshow.

Also, if you answer somebody with a quote, you'll suddenly find yourself followed by quotebots (everybody from Gandhi to Marilyn Monroe) - it's weird. (Also, some of these things that claim to be quotebots are just adbots. Go figure.

It's a strange world out there. I'm just sayin'...

To Duh, or not to Duh? That is the Question

In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, (1890), Lord Henry Wotton says to painter Basil Hallward, "[B]eauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid."

How right Lord Henry was, and The American People™, I'm delighted to report, are apparently in entire agreement with him. Thinking, you see -- especially thinking about political affairs and the basic facts of economics, who's controlling one's government, and all that sort of dryasdust thing -- is very bad for the profile, and perhaps even unhealthy for the constitution. It makes a person unattractive and unhappy.

What else is a body to gather from such polls as the recent one from Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, referenced in its article, Public Knows Basic Facts about Politics, Economics, But Struggles with Specifics? (This is a poll I saw mentioned in a Nov. 20, 2010 HuffPo article entitled, Less Than Half The Nation Knows That GOP Took Back The House: Pew Poll.) It would appear that in spite of all the hoopla on and about November 2, fewer than half of us managed to soak up the knowledge that the GOP had in fact retaken the House of Representin'. Perhaps it's just protective self-denial, but Democrats did even worse than Republicans on that issue, and in general the liberal performance on a spate of questions was nothing to kick up one's donkey-heels about.

The impression I got from this poll is that Democrats are impressively uninformed about an impressive variety of things, while Republicans are slightly less impressive in that regard, which of course only means that since they're a bit more "with it" on the basics, they must as a group be diabolically obtuse, given how often they're dead wrong when it comes to policy. And as for the Youth of America, well, don't ask -- apparently, the majority of those vacuous tossers couldn't give you their correct ages, let alone tell you which party won the House earlier this month.  (As Bill Maher might say, "Oh, I kid the Youth of America, I kid them affectionately....)

Polls like this always make me splutter a sip or two of my morning coffee, even though they're by no means a genuine surprise. All I can say is, if we want to remain a republic, we have to show a little initiative and think for ourselves, keep ourselves informed. Most people are harried, just trying to keep their heads above water. Even so, democratic-spirited forms of government require at least a minimum of with-it-ness from the people if they're to keep themselves going. If "don't have a clue" is the default response to all things political, ours is in serious trouble: easy pickings for the next demagogue, the next traders in fear and loathing, the next set of corporate-interest-servicing, elective-office-seeking power-grabbers. There must be at least a healthy-sized enlightened minority to keep things viable, people who may be all nose or all forehead (or all snout, in my case) but who have some idea which party is in charge of things, what's been done or is about to be done and by whom to whom, and all that not-as-much-fun-as-reality-TV rot.

Well, that's quite enough pontificating from this ignorant lizard. You can read the Pew poll for yourselves and come up with your own answer as to whether we are doing ourselves proud or descending rapidly into a Republic of Duh.  I have to go water my potted plants with some nourishing sports drink, just like the post-intelligence farmers make the crops flourish in Idiocracy.