There is nothing more irritating, and I find this happens a lot at Starbucks, when you order a grande tea, for anyone living in the North this is the medium 16oz mug and pronounced ‘grawn-day’, the tea bag string is strapped tightly around the handle of the mug. By the time you’ve reached ‘help yourself’ counter you have wasted the best part of your drink trying to rip the bag off the handle and in the process scolding your hand. I’m too much of a coward to complain especially when the Latvian barista offers you the drink as if it was a trophy, presents a strained grin and implores you to ‘enjoy’.
Nursing several burnt fingers earlier this morning I was intrigued by this smartly dressed man in his fifties, who almost certainly held down a junior management job for one of the local banks, I think it must have been the company aftershave. I was intrigued by his mutterings as he fiddled with his Blackberry. With considerable eye straining I gleamed that he had just set up a Twitter account. His first tweet was ‘hey Bruno, I’ve just signed up to Twitter’. I know this because this fifty year old dick called Bruno moments later and spoke to Bruno and informed him that the tweet had been sent, in a state of euphoria this dick implored Bruno to watch out for this and ‘future tweets but not for a few hours because he had some work to do (thank fuck for that), and for the record, fifty year old men should not begin any sentences with the word ‘hey’, its on a par with necrophilia.
The Twitter dick got me thinking, I know that Twitter gets on my tits, but I needed to work out why, and with a mug of lukewarm tea for company I spent ten minutes internalising a rant. Everyone seems to be blabbering on about Twitter these days, it’s so irritating, tweeting (I cringe just typing out the word, in fact I feel aggression festering) is on a par with standing on a rooftop screaming out nonsensical one-liners that no one has any interest in, put simply no one gives a chicken shit. It’s designed for self-important nonentities and celebrities (such as Richard Madeley, why?). You also have to learn stupid codes to use Twitter, even to do simple things like ‘reply’ and ‘quote’, why not programme in buttons, so much easier.
I’m pretty sure Twitter is bandied about as a social networking site but little conversation takes place because the character limit discourages any creativity. Essentially Twitter is a soapbox where the author attempts to promote an image of monumental coolness and fails miserably.
What truly makes Twitter shit is the people that use it. Tweeting mundane stuff like describing the food you have just eaten or that you plan to fart shortly is painful and should be replaced with more useful pastimes like placing the nozzle of a handgun into your mouth and counting slowly to ten, anything but posting tweets. The thought that there are people out there that genuinely believe that we are interested in their mundane lives is shocking, however we continue to accept this constant vomit of pointless useless information.
Twitter shields a darker side, it harbours the disintegration of privacy. It encourages the need to expose everything to the public on a daily basis. People have become extensions of today’s technology, inextricably drawn to its machinations. We’ve lost the ability to communicate normally with living people.
I have to continue with the rant. There is a technological dependence. People Facebooking (you see it’s become a verb in the Present Continuous tense) on laptops and Iphones in coffee shops, checking their email on Blackberrys as they walk through shopping centres and when travelling, either standing, walking or sitting, wired up to iPods, and of course there’s the constant texting. Yes, privacy has disintegrated, and I haven’t even got into the political implications.
And there is a big point here isn’t there? It’s just that we don’t give a shit, we just carry on churning out the bilious inanities regardless, and maybe I don’t give a shit either because I stress more about a tangled stringed teabag.
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