Let Them Eat Tweets

[didymus]

I ran across this in the NY Times ‘The Medium’ column:

[ friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

Twitter

Emily DickinsonSouth by SouthwestSterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.Facebook](Twitter - The New York Times)

It is interesting that Sterling should be expressing these ideas – he was one of the, if not the, original cyberpunk novelists. Maybe he’s ahead of the curve again and there will be a new wave when it will be a badge of honor that the only way to be reached is by phone (no voice mail or text, of course) and the ability to compose a letter in neat script with a fountain pen is valued.

 

[Dtmccameron]

…
Maybe he’s ahead of the curve again and there will be a new wave when it will be a badge of honor that the only way to be reached is by phone (no voice mail or text, of course) and the ability to compose a letter in neat script with a fountain pen is valued.

Ooooh! The fountain pen! Trouble is, as many doubts as people do have about “the system” they are, at least, right to have them about the postal system. A letter was recently delivered 47 years late, and both the sender and recipient were dead. E-mails, conversely, are not so very often misplaced.

And do you mean to say that the curmudgeons who refused to integrate will, at long last have the world look upon them as heroes, and devotees to a higher way of life, as opposed to the sell outs and geeks with their camera-music player-computer-phone-watch-calculator-internet-tiny buttoned-thingamabob?

 

[didymus]

And do you mean to say that the curmudgeons who refused to integrate will, at long last have the world look upon them as heroes, and devotees to a higher way of life, as opposed to the sell outs and geeks with their camera-music player-computer-phone-watch-calculator-internet-tiny buttoned-thingamabob?

Not so much the curmudgeons who refused to try anything new in the first place, perhaps but the over-connected who come to realise that wisdom is not to be found on the information highway and that time for solitude & reflection is more valuable than tweeting or chatting.