I’m all for the emancipatory power of the blogosphere and the various tools and services it idolizes. But occasionally don’t you want to have a Kingsley Amis moment and long for a more evolved and sophisticated level of discourse?
I realize it’s boring to play the disillusioned elitist card, but it all gets a little wearing when you’re bombarded by the minute with barely literate ramblings unpacking the minutiae of each new feed aggregator, groundbreaking use of the Twitter API and bombastic rubbish about the world changing in lock-step with the launch of each new navel gazing set of online tools. Particularly when you know that, deep down, none of the people writing about this stuff actually believe in it themselves.
Recently it’s been all about whether Twitter does or does not deserve a lofty valuation for the financing it may or may not have closed. And in turn whether normal people know about or, not to put too fine a point on it, give a flying f**k about Twitter. Here’s a hint: earnestly insisting they do won’t make it so.
I quite like Twitter and in many ways see it to be a fascinating social experiment gone almost wrong. But the spectacle of the kind of grown adults with whom I used to discuss, oh I don’t know, literature, art and politics, indulging the trivial, the mundane and the puerile to the nth degree is fantastically depressing.
What it comes down to is this: the promise of web 2.0 was in large part about utility, usability and elegant solutions to hitherto difficult problems. As is the case in any bubble in which the once truly passionate inflating’s almost done, first principles get forgotten.
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