tweet me

Posted at 19 Jan 3:39 pm. 1 comment

As a member of the yuppie-twenties still clinging desperately to my hipness and youth, I’d like to claim an affinity to Twitter the way so many of my online media-savvy friends do.

Alas, unlike an orgasm, I can’t fake it.

Twitter, I used to think in horror as I waded daily through an avalanche of 140-character tweets, is the propagation and validation of mental diarrhea.

On one end of the literary scale you have books: great masterpieces of critical thinking and solid, carefully expounded stances, which take years to write. (Some of them, anyway. Twi-shite, er, Twilight, not included.)

On the other end: Twitter, which broadcasts to the world every insignificant piece of drivel that passes through your brain at the speed your fingers can type.

What Twitter, with its speed-of-type broadcasting ability, is unequivocally good for is spreading news. Or gossip. The line between the two is naturally rather thin.

Said line grows dangerously so when posters no longer even have to take five minutes  to produce a reasonably researched blog post, hopefully reinforced by a couple of factual links and a picture. Just re-tweet it, bub.

Thankfully the main yardstick for a news tweet’s believability is a credible source: a link to a credible article.

And those, fortunately, don’t come with 140-character limits.