fm Bandit

RIP Whitney; go watch that video of her singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991.

I think it would be a funny feature for a blog to post uninteresting stuff late on Sunday night to encourage people to go to bed and get ready for their week and stuff. Here goes: This is a pretty uninteresting piece from three and a half years ago about how hard it is to get twitter.

Not like, sign up for twitter, but, like get it, man; as though the reason we’re not addicted to twitter is because the perspective is metaphysically inaccessible. There’s a clear equivocation made between the author’s inability to explain something and the inexplicable in general.

We have moved beyond “generation gap” differences in technology use and moved into the “experiential gap” in terms of use and understanding. Your experience with an application such as Twitter provides an understanding that cannot be communicated by reading about it or even being told about it.

Twitter is simple–another hallmark of powerful applications. Blogging is simple. RSS is simple. These are all important technologies that characterize this second major phase of the Internet–but you wouldn’t know that unless you use them, unless you are involved with them.

I believe I’m with the majority of the internet in being completely aware of the importance of Web 2.0; however, like most of the real world, I have a job that doesn’t involve a laptop and a word count, so I don’t have time to push the food lever repeatedly. Presently, I’m not a twitterer myself. [edit: must tweet; i love twitter] I have facebooked, but my account is currently deactivated. [edit: the flesh is weak–oh look, a new comment] To be sure, I won’t deny that there’s likely some ephemeral qualia of twitter-ness. I just think it’s rather absurd for a tech blogger–who ostensibly makes his living on bridging the gap between technology and relevance–to claim such experience is entirely beyond the relational scope of all possible words.

Interestingly, the article ends with the understatement that twitter doesn’t have a business model, and may not endure in its present form. That was 2008. Today there’s still no business model, but people keep gorging themselves relentlessly on 140-character, cognitive-behavioral munchies:

…In the digital space, consumption does not deplete a resource, but rather encourages that resource to reproduce. The visitor can eat all they desire and never get full…
– define: Impossible Feast

The key to monetizing Twitter could be rolling out premium accounts, and for a price one could be let in on the secret of what the whole point is.

p.s. It is probably a generation gap, but I would probably deny that if I were Leo Laporte.

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