On Microblogging

Nowadays you can link your cellphone to your twitter/plurk account to your blogger account which you can link to your facebook account and you can say one thing once and have it heard by everybody in five different ways and people will think it's normal.

If you did this 20 years ago, telling somebody where you last ate via phone, Fax, snailmail, and telegram, they'd just think you're being an over-important asshole.

Microblogging kinda reflects the fast-paced mindset of people today. No longer do we need to go about reflecting at the end of the day of the things that transpired so we can calmly and collectively write about it in a single journal entry. It's now all about one liner bullet points that you write as you go, which is good for two things. First because you probably wont remember anymore about what's happening given the fast paced nature of life nowadays and second, because chances are, a short note is about as much as the average technofag's attention capacity can hold.

I'm not saying microblogging is a bad thing. Shorter messages tend to get composed faster, get remembered better, and travel faster. Brevity is the soul of wit, as well as of not making a lot of grammatical mistakes. People sound more intelligent when they say less. It clearly has its advantages when put to good use, but not so frequently it becomes retarded. Throwing short messages in rapid succession isn't being witty. It's the literary form of stuttering.

As for people who are saying microblogging is a replacement of journal writing, I do no think that's the case. If ever, it's only a complementary device. See, the thing about the things we write online is that unlike the many stupid things that our parents did when they were young, ours is permanent and chances are, 20, 30 years on, our kids will be reading what we wrote online. Granted literacy does not become as extinct as structured writing, would you really want your kids to learn that your entire literary legacy is a bunch of one-line accounts of what happened on an hourly basis?

We'd probably not be reading Anne Frank's story as much if it's in a format of one liners filled with emoticons and LOLs.

9:15 PM STILL TRAPPED IN THE ATTIC. REAL QUIET NOW BUT I CAN STILL CONNECT TO PLURK! LOL TAKE THAT NAZIS XD XD XD

Yeah, that.