Ever since Adam Carolla went off the air earlier this year, morning drive talk has been sparse, boring and pretty lifeless. This morning, however, John Ridley’s quick commentary on KNPR at least gave me a short smile and of course something to rant about.
It’s no secret that social networking as a whole fascinates me, but in a different way than most. To this day, frankly, I still haven’t figured it out. I’ve been in this game long enough to remember SixDegrees and watch the MySpace explosion, see the mess that Second Life and Facebook are becoming and now, there’s Twitter. At least with SixDegrees and MySpace there was an actual theme, and even with Second Life and Facebook I can almost understand why, but Twitter is a conundrum in itself.
Being the professional that he is, I couldn’t say it all any better than he did, so here is Mr. Ridley’s post/comment:
At the risk of sounding like that old guy in Gran Torino telling those “young punks” to “get off my lawn,” it’s gotten to the point that whenever I hear somebody talking about Twitter or twittering or tweeting it just makes my little tummy want to hurl.
I haven’t tweeted once in my life, but I’m sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you’re about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating. So yesterday, like two-way pagers. And AOL.
To be honest, I think tweeting jumped the shark long before ultrahip CNN got into a Twitter match against superdown Ashton Kutcher. Back when politicians started live-tweeting responses to the president’s demi-State of the Union address, Twitter had already taken on all the cool of your mom getting a tattoo.
I imagine, I hope, twitterers are ultimately headed for the social networking retirement home that’s the current residence of Second Life and MySpace.
But my real issue with social networking sites isn’t their faddishness.
It’s the hypocrisy that goes with them.
We claim to be a nation of people who take our privacy very seriously. Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation.
But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can’t tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.
Seriously, does valuable broadband space need to be taken up with announcements in that creepy Facebook third-person-ese that “John is enjoying two-for-one margaritas with the rest of the IT Team at T.G.I. Fridays”?
Where is the expectation of privacy anymore? Or, more correctly, where is the expectation that people will keep their private nonsense to themselves so that those of us who still like to communicate personal information with one person at a time don’t have to get caught up in somebody else’s e-mail circles or listen to their one-sided cell phone conversations?
No, I don’t know what’s hipper; to Facebook or to Twitter. I just know for me, personally, discretion never went out of style.
To be sure, Mr. Ridley, like myself, operates a blog which most people view no differently than Twitter might be, but there is a distinct difference. For him, the blog isn’t an outlet for sharing personal details and interacting in a social sense so much as it is a platform for discussing social concerns where technology comes into play, just like this blog is a sounding board for issues that affect areas that I teach.
Of course Mr. Ridley’s post was lambasted almost immediately in the comments. The one that got my gourd was “I say keep your old-fashioned opinions to yourself and off the air.” There is a certain virtue to old fashioned opinions, and just as the person who wrote the comment feels it appropriate to air his discontent over the post, Mr. Ridley certainly has the right to voice it.
[read "Keep Your Tweets To Yourself" here]