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Is the World Becoming One Big Tweet?

“A revolution isn’t a dinner party.” - Mao Zedong

There’s a blessing (or curse) “May you live in interesting times” that I’ve reflected upon in the last few months.  With the financial system in turmoil, the job market being the toughest we’ve seen in over 70 years, the H1N1 flu spreading rapidly, anxiety is high. On a different level, life is becoming one big tweet.

Things are changing around us on so many levels whether we like it or not.  “New forces are starting to shift and collide.” (Ramo, 2009)  But are we smart enough, more importantly, astute enough to take a step back and look at what’s going on, to factor in history and learn from our mistakes, to correct course, to take the “moments of peril” (Ramo, 2009) and turn them “into historic moments of reinvention?” (Ramo, 2009)

To be honest, I’m a little scared that we aren’t.  We seem to be so busy focusing on the weeds and immediacy that we aren’t seeing the forest for the trees.  We aren’t analyzing and learning and ruminating from a 30,000 foot perspective, instead we’re busy collecting friends and followers, typing pithy 140 tweet-bites, and reacting with knee jerk decisions to create stock blips. We are in the Impulse Era.

Whether it’s studying how social media is affecting our culture rather than focusing on building a marketing strategy or spending “more time talking to the guy serving the coffee and less time informing the world that the coffee had, in fact, been served,” (Bai, 2009) we are drunk on overstimulation.

We see it in politics.  Matt Bai touches on this in his New York Times Magazine article discussing Twitter and politics…

“Politics today is already too simplistic and binary, its news cycle more comically truncated and ephemeral than at any time in our history; in the age of email, blogs, and smartphones, we seem to react to everything with a kind of frantic, predictable impulse (Tax all the bonuses! Kill all the pirates!) rather than with a longer-term consideration of benefits and consequences.” 

Commenters on blogs and online newpapers rant and rave on topics because they can, but do they even read what they post?  It seems to be more about “hearing” themselves “talk” than about analyzing the particular topic.  Virginia Heffernan discusses this behavior of commenters on online newspaper sites in her article…

“What commenters don’t do is provide a sustained or inventive analysis..”  In fact, critics hardly seem to connect one column to the next.”

 “But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t , as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.  Instead, paradoxically, commenters frequently reiterate [the author’s] own arguments in the services of their would-be critiques.”

“This echo-chamber effect is unpleasant, and it makes it hard to keep listening for the clearer, brighter, rarer voices nearly drowned out in the online din.  Which is too bad: newspaper journalism benefits from reader comments.”

Even the tools that have become enmeshed into our lives are evidence that we aren’t concerned with the bigger picture that somehow, someway they will have to be paid for in the end.  All these mechanisms that we use for free, that are connecting us and increasing the dopamine levels every time we get a new follower, @reply, or friend, have you considered that they aren’t making money yet?  That eventually the venture capitalists will stop feeding the zoo animals.  Are we on yet another bubble that is about to pop, and yet once again we’re too enthralled by the shining object we don’t see the big needle that’s about to burst our bubble.  We just continue to bubble hop.

We are too caught up in the immediate gratification that we don’t seem to be contemplating where we will end up at the end of this adventure.  So it makes me wonder if historians will look back on this time and see another Gilded Age that transformed into a Progressive Era or will we FAIL .  Where will we come out on the other end?  When will we come out?  What will the world look like? 

Time will only tell if it will be for the good or for the bad.  But you can bet it won’t be a dinner party.  However, I agree with Joshua Cooper Ramo from his article, “Brave New Worlds”, “…it’s worth noting that all the insanity around us notwithstanding, there will be a moment when this age will start to make sense.  That brave new world will look very different than it does now.”

So a toast to living in interesting times, may the brave new world not burst our bubble!

 

Works Cited

Bai, M. (2009, April 26). The Chatty Classes. New York Times Magazine .

Ramo, J. C. (2009, May/June). Brave New Worlds. Departures .