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.

Thanks

Jeff Lindsey

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.