3 ms·

>> those whose who have something worth saying tend to ...write books. It was never so easy buying books like today, so I don't get why I should waste my time

>> those whose who have something worth saying tend to ...write books. It was never so easy buying books like today, so I don't get why I should waste my time reading #random #unimportant #stuff written by some social media managing intern from Bangalore.

K0SM0S 10y ago
No but seriously... so much this. Pardon my casualness. Whenever we strive for both 'quality' (of information, talk/debate, etc.) and 'brevity', we end up with the exact opposite of books: traits d'esprit as they say in french, #randomWordPlays of the empty kind that made Levi Strauss hypothesize that humans didn't really form sentences but rather patched together chunks of expressions they had memorized (he was proven wrong by linguistics later on, but damn was his assumption so impeccably fitting much of the anthropological data). See any bland instance of "cheesy jpeg + logically flawed pensum" boasting thousands of likes/reshares circa 2017 to prove this point. It's nothing new either, for as long as documented human societies existed, mind-numbing memes apparently were part of the landscape. For about as long, some (always much fewer) people prefered reading books. Or even writing them. I don't think Twitter can ever be anywhere but at the far opposite side of books and quality discourse. Or it would become something else. Twitter is meant for remarks, quick-shot killer moves, and plugs. It's basically an ad board for opinion, and you've made a sale when someone likes/shares your tweet. Some people might defigure the sacred columns with a Shakespeare quote here and there, but vandalizing its culture is the only way to make a smart tweet. I think it's OK that Twitter is 'dumb', as in non-filtering. Neutral towards speech, unpurposed. We need that too, just like we need curated libraries. It's fine that people have a place to vent and unwind. So long as they don't mistake that for an actual forum of opinion, let alone representative of anything but the few 'influencers' and their circles.

K0SM0S 10y ago

No but seriously... so much this. Pardon my casualness. Whenever we strive for both 'quality' (of information, talk/debate, etc.) and 'brevity', we end up with the exact opposite of books: traits d'esprit as they say in french, #randomWordPlays of the empty kind that made Levi Strauss hypothesize that humans didn't really form sentences but rather patched together chunks of expressions they had memorized (he was proven wrong by linguistics later on, but damn was his assumption so impeccably fitting much of the anthropological data). See any bland instance of "cheesy jpeg + logically flawed pensum" boasting thousands of likes/reshares circa 2017 to prove this point. It's nothing new either, for as long as documented human societies existed, mind-numbing memes apparently were part of the landscape. For about as long, some (always much fewer) people prefered reading books. Or even writing them. I don't think Twitter can ever be anywhere but at the far opposite side of books and quality discourse. Or it would become something else. Twitter is meant for remarks, quick-shot killer moves, and plugs. It's basically an ad board for opinion, and you've made a sale when someone likes/shares your tweet. Some people might defigure the sacred columns with a Shakespeare quote here and there, but vandalizing its culture is the only way to make a smart tweet. I think it's OK that Twitter is 'dumb', as in non-filtering. Neutral towards speech, unpurposed. We need that too, just like we need curated libraries. It's fine that people have a place to vent and unwind. So long as they don't mistake that for an actual forum of opinion, let alone representative of anything but the few 'influencers' and their circles.