A great jar-field: Twitter
People complain about social media in one breathe and confess they haven’t used it in the next. Here’s Tina Fey doing that particular two-step in a video shared by a blogger who confesses to having once danced that prejudicial dance himself. At the end of his posting, Jonathan Chait delivers a good comment about the real nature of the beast–in this case, Twitter:
Like Fey, I started with a distrust/misunderstanding of Twitter, but quickly found it to be a super-efficient system for filtering out the crap I don’t want to wade through on the Internet and delivering the stuff I want to read, written or recommended by my favorite writers, to me. I also like to use it to trade quips. I’ve quickly grown addicted to it. I’ve seen enough writers go through the process — hate Twitter, get reluctantly dragooned on to it, discover you can’t live without it — that I attribute basically all hatred of Twitter to a lack of familiarity.
In other words, people filter the massive output of all the world’s typists and share the best of it through links and annotations on Twitter. It’s like a science fiction movie with thousands of brains in jars calculating something that will bring on the new utopia–or dystopia, sure, why not? Twitter is a great jar-field of floating brains sorting the world’s texts for use by the ones who still walk about. [Via @atrembath.]
I am really prejudiced against Twitter, mostly because my peers use it for silly things. However, I like “a great jar-field of floating brains.” That image makes me happy.