This again

Really that is enough enough about Twitter now. Something that is not an original idea (and which I have moaned about before) has become a vitally important piece of news content.

They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature.

Oh sweet mother of fuck, protect us from these charlatans and bullshitters. If this is a cynical cash-in then fair play to them, I just don't see why it warrants free advertising. If it is in anyway serious then things are worse that I feared. To repeat myself, this is not an original idea, it is a fun parlour game that should not be repackaged and foisted upon the gullible nor used to appeal to the worst qualities of the verbally incontinent, the vapid and the self-obsessed.

One thing that worries is the fashionable delusion in all sorts of media circles that words, language and literature must now be reduced to mere "content" – a thing that has no intrinsic merit in itself, but which can be packaged, marketed and judged on its ad-generating powers. In other words, a triumph of the bullshitters which will seriously degrade culture, literature and thought.

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Add journalism to that list too. There are some people who give every impression that the most important thing about the Iranian revolution is that it's on Twitter. Well no it isn't actually, though it's one faddish way of getting some people's voices heard; after all, there are multiple ways in which the net has allowed information to leak out - Facebook and Fark (of all things) have got in on the act, so too YouTube.

The trouble with the tweets from Tehran is that the stew of rumour and misinformation can obscure as much as it can enlighten. (As illustrated here - note too the claim that Moldova's authorities used Twitter to sew confusion and misinformation among the protesters there). Oh and the fact that the death of the People's Pederast has overwhelmed Twitter (sorry Iranians, you're already last week's news). There is no substitute for having proper journalists, who know the territory and the people, on the ground trying to sift through the mass of claim and counter-claim and give an accurate reflection of what is really going on. (An impossible task, of course, but one can make a decent stab at it).

I wonder if this confusion between the means and ends doesn't date back to the Reformation and the role of the printing presses in spreading Protestant ideas. Without denying the importance of technology in spreading ideas, I don't think the existence of the printing press itself explains why the Lutherans succeeded where the Hussites or the Lollards (for example) failed.

In revolutions the means in which the message has been spread was never as important as the message itself. In other words, a printing press is no substitute for having a Luther, a Milton or a Jefferson to hand; or a Lenin for that matter. If the Iranian revolution doesn't have a clearer message that a random sequence of 140-character comments, I very much fear it will not succeed.

PS: The following rather illustrates the point.

British homewares retailer Habitat apologized on Wednesday after ads for the store appeared on Twitter tagged with words linked to the Iranian election crisis.

Some Twitter users became angry after the upmarket store's messages turned up in searches for topics such as "Iran" and "Mousavi," the name of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Events, hijacked by bullshit merchants online.

Could everyone shut about Twitter now please?

A few weeks ago I remember saying (this was in real life, there's no mention of it on the blog) that it was only a matter of time before some cretin tried to rewrite Ulysses via Twitter (possibly as life on Bloomsday). Sure enough:

"Maybe we are only just beginning to appreciate the potential of Twitter as an art form," he said.

[Tim] Collins, whose The Little Book of Twitter is published this week, said it was ironic that the novel he had most trouble shortening was Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, which is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that has much in common with many Twitter updates.

Some examples:

Ulysses

jamesjoyce: Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.

How stunningly banal. In a way, though, it's quite an achievement to miss the point of both Twitter and literature. Of the two I far prefer the latter - obviously - whereas the former seems to have passed its high watermark. Not that I object to the idea of laconic literary summaries - some of you may remember my six-word game. The point is that it's a fun parlour game that tells about the reader and how they perceive a book. And to try and condense everything into an ultra-laconic form, all the damned time, rapidly becomes intolerable.

In the case of Twitter: it's a great example of how just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should. The compulsion to reduce everything, to simplify and to always be instantaneous is going too far. Those who wish to reduce everything to series of tweets are either reducing their own capacity for profound thought, or were incapable of it in the first place.

There has to mental space for longueurs; for slow, considered thought, silence and reflection. You may regard my intermittent silences on this blog as a service in that regard. (You may also regard it as bone idleness, of course, but I like to demonstrate how idleness can be a virtue).

More generally I am coming round to the view that a lot of the contemporary technological fads have passed their high watermark. Far too much stuff out there: far too little worth bothering with. Most of its free, of course, but that's pretty much what its worth. (I include supposedly commercial operations in this; self too of course).

When critics disagree, the blogger is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All blogging is quite useless.

Loving not nature more but man the less

What is it about jihadists and outdoor pursuits in north Wales? First we had the whitewater rafting London bombers, and now we learn that failed London and Glasgow airport bomber Bilal Abdulla and his friends used to enjoy hiking across Snowdonia.

My own childhood memories of holidaying in north Wales are ones of rain, unremitting dreariness, bleak prospects and tawdry amusement parks (oh, okay and walking up Mount Snowdon; it was a cloudy day and I couldn't see much at the top); had the jihadists been subjected to this I could understand (if not condone, you know) their violent hatred of humanity. But what they were doing sounds a lot more fun than huddling behind a windbreak on a pebble-strewn beach during a squall.

However, it so happens that outdoor pursuits are also beloved of financial institutions (or at least they were, I'm not sure whether they can still afford that sort of thing) for precisely the same reason that jihadists seem so fond of them: as team-building exercises. The slightly alarming implication of it all is that if you can get people to forge a esprit de corps with a bit of good clean fun outdoors then you can get them to almost anything together.

It has been noted elsewhere that jihadists are rather adept at adopting some of the techniques of western corporate capitalism: branding, franchising (al-Qaeda in Iraq is the best known example of this phenomenon), internet marketing techniques and so on. I need hardly add, though, that western corporate capitalism has been far more effective at destroying itself than jihadism ever has.

However, I wonder whether the fact that al-Qaeda and its followers (Abdulla himself was trying to expand the brand in Britain, on a freelance basis if you like) have also adopted the bullshitting elements of capitalism contains the seeds of its own failure. If you can buy into the nonsense of team-building exercises and the like, you end up institutionalising group think.

And the problem with getting everyone thinking in the same way is that when you get things wrong, no one is willing to question it. In the case of capitalism, it means no one questions the wisdom of lending lots of money to people who can't afford to pay it back and then selling on the debt in deliberately opaque ways which means no one knows who owes what to whom; whereas in the case of jihadism means no one wants to question the fact that indescriminate slaughter tends to make most of your fellow Muslims hate you.

I like to think that in the dark recesses of the caves on the Afghan/Pakistani frontier there hang dozens of motivational posters, with suitably platinitudinous messages of religious inspiration and encouragement. Anyone foolish enough to buy into that sort of thing, to be motivated by them, indeed, deserves everything they get.



Here are some more demotivational posters, let us cultivate an air of healthy cynicism: σκεπτομαι.

People will copy anything

The Sunday Times says:

Make me like Gordon: doctors are reporting a surge in the number of middle-aged men plumping for Botox injections, to enhance their authority by emulating the premier’s glower.

Are they paying to get the bags under their eyelids inflated too?