“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” –T.S. Eliot
Many people think back to their juvenile literature classes and remember that Farenheit 451 was a cautionary tale. They then assume to remember that it’s a cautionary tale against oppressive governments that burn books. I would proffer that this ‘oppressive fascist regime’ interpretation is a remnant of post-war public school social engineering. I think that Bradbury might just as much have been lamenting the death of the book as a medium. The populous of his future dystopia voluntarily stopped reading– preferring abridged versions to formal novels, then pamphlets, and finally, a small steady diet of word-pablum from the government.
I am a few days into Twitter so far, and I am starting to think that we may be one step closer: books became articles several decades ago. The web shortened those further to summaries, and RSS shortened the news even further. On a personal level, publishing has exploded; everyone’s an author, a film critic, a technomaven, a pop-diva queen. However, the publishing medium is getting shorter and shorter. Back in the day, we had to code our HTML by hand (dammit). Soon enough, we publi-shit-izens [yes, intentional] realized we could get attention and traffic by simply uploading pictures of our cat, or describing the toast we had that morning. TypePad made this all too easy. Blogs got shorter. Now we’ve come to twitter, and we’re down to a simple 160 characters. Services now can simply ping each other’s mobile phones and tell you if a friend is within 500 feet (physically).
My money is on the iPhone app that can sense your mood from your body heat and movement while it sits in your pants pocket– and broadcasts out to all your peeps when it judges that you’re likely in heat.
Mind you, I’m not passing judgment one way or the other on this. It’s not evil or good– the text is just getting progressively shorter. I am still trying to figure out if it’s because the reader attention-span is getting shorter, or because 99.9% of the masses have anything viable to say beyond 160 characters. I suspect the latter.
This post took me ten minutes to write. I still haven’t said jack that has not been said a thousand times previously. Do you feel smarter now that you’re at the end? This post was really just a way to get my twitter address out: @davejenk1ns
note: that is a real photo of a real book burning in 2007 New Mexico, United States. Some Christians think Harry Potter is evil.
I don’t feel smarter — I feel like we are getting stupider and more impatient. I like iPhones too, but I killed my Twitter account after a few minutes. Boring.
Oh if only 160 characters - it is actually only 140! Great post, Dave.
Hate to get all literary, but I’ve been having this same conversation with a friend and will reuse what I wrote to him.
I’m not sure Twitter isn’t just an acceleration into what David Foster Wallace called, “a culture and volume of info. and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value.”
Since more and more of the crowd seems to be jumping into Twitter, I’m torn as to whether I should follow or if this isn’t as good a place as any to realize that it might just as easily be a bunch of lemmings jumping off a cliff that i do not want to follow.
I get that Twitter is a good thing. I know that it is easy to say that if you don’t keep up, the social media generation is going to leave you behind. However, there comes a time to wonder whether the human mind can really process everything, or if we’re losing something important by letting ourselves be too wired.
Ever since I had an Apple IIe a long time ago, I’ve always had a self image of someone who was technologically hip. That may be finally changing. I want to notice (and appreciate) what’s going on around me.
The classic David Foster Wallace quote on this feeling is from his commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005.
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys. How’s the water?’ And the two fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks at the other and says, ‘What the hell is water?’ ”
At some point in one’s life, you get comfortable deciding you’d rather be the older fish. Maybe Twitter is that point for me, but at the same time I realize that from a career/money/geek-self-image standpoint I can’t step off the ride just yet, so I’ll be tweeting.
Dave, did you ever live in Danville Il in 1982 on Franklin st.
Thanks
Jeff Lindsey
Dave,
Fantastic image and thought-provoking discussion. I’d like to get your permission to use the image as part of a book cover - ironic but true. How would you feel about that? I’ve left messages elsewhere for you to this effect. Not really the theme of this thread, except the irony, but it’d be good to hear from you about the possibility.