Exreality.NET

It took me awhile to realize that there are a lot of things that make me angry, especially related to my trade of writing. My last rant went over the horrors of the female video blog, or “the vagina monoblogs” as distorted coined it a few days ago. I thought the only horrible side of blogging was vlogs, but I managed to find something else worth ranting about.

Following President Obama’s speech to Congress last week, the media was buzzing with reports of Congressmen “twittering” during the speech. Having just been exposed to Twitter a week ago because I wanted a free promo code to download a game demo on my Playstation 3, I was appalled that middle-aged professionals who we’ve put in charge of our country are acting like bored children in a high school classroom. For the uninformed, Twitter is the new rage in social networking sites that acts as a blatant advertisement for whatever kind of crap you’re promoting. In essence, it’s a 140 character Facebook status that is sent to all your followers that can range from what you’re currently doing to a quick quip about how your physics professor sounds like Kermit the Frog or whatever mindless dribble you can fit into 140 characters that still no one cares about. Just for this rant I’ve created my own Twitter account, check it out here. I figured that it would be helpful to see it, if I haven’t described it well enough thus far. One feature I haven’t mentioned yet is that you can use your “tweets” (personal status) to message the people you are following. Finally, you can add pictures and share them with the crazy people who hang on your every 140 characters per tweet.

Now that we’ve gone over the mechanics of Twitter, allow me to explain what it is. Twitter, first and foremost, is a social networking site that essentially just trims the fat off of your average social networking site like MySpace or Facebook. Fat being communications of over 140 characters, photos that you can keep private, and useless applications to “personalize” your profile with. But if this is just a social networking site, why is this under my new series called “Attack of the Blog” you wonder? That is because Twitter is more than a social networking site where it’s just you and your handful of friends that you personally know and others that are just casual acquaintances. Twitter is being used as a form of micro-blogging and as free advertisement for blogs. When I joined Twitter hours ago, I was given a handful of people to follow by default and who did I find on it? None other than the last vlogger from my previous rant, iJustine. It’s natural to want to promote your blog as much as possible, so I don’t fault people for it. But my real problem is that Twitter is being used for micro-blogging, especially by the older generations.

I guess it’s time to define some more terminology. Micro-blogging is the next big trend in the blogging community. Essentially, it’s just talking about what you’re currently doing, like a status update from Facebook, but it’s being sent to random followers of your Twitter account, just like how real bloggers write for the random people who visit their site. The only upside to Twitter is that it allows you to know how many people are following you and who they are (at this moment I have four followers and I know for sure that at least one of them is not a robot trying to infect my computer or steal my money). The downside is much greater because micro-blogging is just a copout. It takes no thought whatsoever to just say what you’re currently doing multiple times a day on Twitter. Hell I did that every day on Facebook for a few weeks back in November until someone yelled at me for changing my status too often. But micro-blogging spreads a false idea that we (the general public) want to know every useless thing that a Tweeter does. And again, NO ONE CARES. We do not care that your power is out and it will not come back on until tomorrow so you can’t send Tweets although you somehow managed to write one.

This brings us back to the Congressmen who have tried to adopt new technologies to make the general public feel more connected to what’s happening in Congress. With the start of the 111th United States Congress, politicians decided to create their own personal YouTube channels and apparently their own Twitter accounts. I think in some ways, this was inspired by President Obama’s successful grassroots campaign while vying for the Presidency and his use of technology to reach out to the average person. As they say, even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Whereas Obama has people who are in the know technology-wise, the average elected official does not. In fact I’m sure some Congressmen don’t even have an aid that knows how to open a Word document. But for some reason, someone has tossed a web-enabled phone at most of congress and told senators and representatives alike of Twitter. Thus they get the illusion of connecting with the younger generations, by acting like the younger generation.

During the President’s speech to Congress last Wednesday, a plethora of congressmen decided that it would be a good idea to use Twitter while the President was speaking. These are the grown men and women of our society, the ones that get angry at teens for texting while in a classroom, and they’ve decided that it’s ok for them to tweet while the President is giving a good speech. And it wasn’t just the Republicans trying to find a way to pass the time, the Democrats were tweeting away as well. They were insulting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, GOP forerunner Bobby Jindal, and anyone else they could see. Essentially, it was like a high school assembly with texts being sent to everyone on the internet. How can teachers and professors have a leg to stand on now that our elected leaders send text like messages to their faithful followers via Twitter? How can they claim that texting in class is rude? I’m just texting one person, and I’m actually paying attention to what’s going on when I’m not typing. Oh and trust me I can type faster than a congressman in his or her late 40s trying to tape away on their blackberry with those small buttons. If you want to see some of the tweets that were sent out during the speech, watch the embedded video below.

My final point that I want to get across is that these lawmakers believe that we want to know ever stupid and superfluous thing that they do. In truth, that’s not what we want. An informed public doesn’t need to know your every action, they don’t want to know about the aspects of your personal life (unless it involves cheating on your wife with creepy prostitutes or a person of the same gender as you), and we certainly don’t want 140 characters combined into a worthless statement full of fluff. The fact that you’re so limited to how many letters you can use signifies that what you say should be important. People want to know what is going on in their government, they want to be informed by those who they’ve elected to be there, and what they need are people who are honest enough to be straight about the issues and take the time to write something worth reading instead of that stupid crap they’ve been shoveling at us via a worthless fad that just lends itself to whoring and superficial stupidity. Where have we gone so askew that we think that Twitter is something worth our time for reading? What happened to the good, old fashioned, well thought out blogs or rants that had substance to them? I have to ask you:
Where are we heading as a society if Twitter is being used by our politicians and we are just sitting idly by while they take any scrap of intelligence we have remaining away from us?

Just so you know, I’m going to be using the Twitter account I made for the next week or so just to prove how idiotic it is. If you have one of those accounts, follow me. And don’t forget to stay with Exreality as we get into a regular ranting schedule again. Finally, we still are looking for writers who are capable of writing witty, thought provoking rants that you enjoy reading on this site.