We're fucked
- This person is popular on twitter
Give our society a new toy and it will rip its head off and shit down its neck. And then complain.
Twitter again, folks. Sometimes it's a wonderful thing. Sometimes it's depressing.
And the thing that's depressing me today about twitter is a little panel on the left that tells me that some made up phrase with a boy band in it is trending. This is not news: it is noise.
In this particular case it's a fan campaign that serves no purpose whatsoever other than to be a self-perpetuating feast of self-love. Aren't we the best fans, because we get our boyband's name trending more often than anyone else? And tomorrow it will be Lady Gaga and the day after, it will be Justin Bieber, and then it will be someone else ad nauseam.
It turns what could be a useful, informative feature in to a game - the trending topics is something that people play, and in many cases do so to generate free advertising, either for the brand or band that they are a fan of, or for themselves.
Indeed, if you are stupid enough to click on a trending topic, hoping to find out why it is trending, then you are more than likely to find that most of the tweets are along the lines of "OMG I can't believe Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga and #LookAtMeNow are trending. I hate them!" - which is nothing but grandstanding.
It worries me that this says that large parts of our culture are basically very, very shallow.
13 October, 2011
