Tag Archives: twitter

Random Reflections, Uncategorized

Provoking a lack of thought

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This post is a response to Fandango of This, That and the Other’s Provocative Question: Whether or not you have a Twitter account, how do you feel about Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the changes he’s made so far. Do you care one way or the other? If you currently are on Twitter, do you plan to continue actively using it?

I’m more than a little sick and tired of hearing about Twitter and Musk, as well as being annoyed that it probably does matter.

I do not now, nor have I ever had, a Twitter account. I cannot foresee any circumstance that would change that.

In the beginning…

When Twitter first started I thought: “what a bad idea! It’s sole purpose is to make people write little provocative blurbs. Way to kill thoughtful discourse!”

A while ago I wrote a post on a similar subject: This is not a Tweet. It was before the takeover. In it I point out that the whole “public square” idea is marketing, not reality. And that decisions would be made to optimize people staring slack jawed at the screen.

Since the takeover…

In a way I was wrong: Mr. Musk hasn’t been very business-like.

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Random Reflections

This is not a Tweet.

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I shouldn’t have to care about Twits and Musk.

I don’t have a Twitter account and barely knew that Mr. Musk had some involvement with Tesla, had the brilliant (?) idea of launching a car into space, and periodically says something stupid that causes the stock markets to react.

Over the last few days I have felt bombarded with references to them. This morning’s paper had two articles about it in the business section, Mr. Maher’s New Rule was about how we should up our BS meters to learn to live with a lack of censorship. I agree, in a way.

We do need to tune up our BS meters. No question about that.

Let us start with the BS that Twitter is either a town square or about “free speech”.

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Stories and Meditations

Three minutes thought

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A long time favorite quote of mine is “Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out, but thought is Irksome…and three minutes is a long time.” A.E. Housman. It was published in the 1930’s!

That last fact is important because it was before the microwave…and twitter. Nothing is irking me today, so the prompt got me pondering: Is three minutes of thought put into every twitter post, on average? I really have no idea since I don’t participate. If it is then: WOW! that’s a lot of thinking!

I struggle with writing, finding just the right words to put into your head the idea I am trying to convey, and find that the shorter the finished piece, the longer it takes me to compose. With a 140 character count I would probably never choke anything out…or never get dinner fixed.

That leads me to ask this question: if all that thinking goes into twitter posts what is being traded for it?

What do you think? (you can use more than 140 characters if you want). Is it the same as what you would think if you spent three minutes on it?