Twitter and the 7 technologies of rejection

what follows is commentary on an email i recieved in response to a post on my other blog. text quoted from the response email is in pink...

Ahhhh….ummm….oh, sea horses in a bag, freeze dried…not good. They are so cute and so much better alive and swimming. Of all the things to eat, do they have to eat sea horses?.....although, their food is so pretty, so alive and colorful looking. Makes our dull American cuisine look rather pale and unappetizing.

sun dried seahorses not for eating? what, we only eat ugly things? leave the cute ones alone? baby pigs are really cute - when they get to 400 pounds we kill and make them into bacon and pork chops. the sea horses were for more medicinal than nutrition i believe.

[the following is an editorial comment on the subject, not intended as a personal disagreement with the person who inspired the commentary]

if you use twitter, i've been sending tweets from my phone. follow me! ok I give up. I don't get why we needed this? wasn't texting and computering enough? How many more ways do people need to do the same thing? Please explain why tweeting/twitter is now being all the rage…..i don't get it. there is a movie out there called, "He's just not that into you". In one preview, Drew Barrymore says "There are 7 kinds of technology to be rejected by now days, I just can't take it"…I cracked up at that. I don't know if I am repeating myself but they are finding out via studies that kids now days are having trouble 'connecting' with other human beings due to their constant attachment to high tech gadgets….texting, cell phoning, twittering, no one is getting any eye contact. No one is connecting on any humane level, no empathy can flourish this way making violence and killing that much easier, not having that human connection. Someone sitting in a room with you, texting, listening to their Ipod, twittering…and no one is actually really interested in what you are having to say. So many ways to communicate and yet the most important way of all is being forgotten…that being talk, touch, and connection

ah, twitter - "why do we need this?", well why not? to people like you and i, who grew up in the "talking face to face" era don't get it.

no one is getting any eye contact. No one is connecting on any humane level, no empathy can flourish this way making violence and killing that much easier, not having that human connection.

that's how us "old farts" see it. sounds so much like my dad, who has asked us a thousand times "what's an iPod, what's MP3?" and no matter what we tell him he always says "what's wrong with silence? why not just sit down and talk to someone? why have music music music in your ears all the time? when do you have time to think?". this from someone whose musical tastes stopped evolving when Lawrence welk died (that's an exaggeration)

for people like us, who have no or few friends, the twitterverse seems stupid. but to millions of ah, hum, younger people out there, they have a huge extended network of friends, many of them only visible online because they are separated by distance. when i was a kid, i could only have buddies who lived within blocks of me. there was no other way to interact. there was no 'call waiting' so if i was on the phone, and my dad was trying to call my mom and tell her there was a military alert and he wasn't coming home for a few days, all he got was a busy signal, so my phone calls were limited to 5 MINUTES.

yeah, people now have 7 different kinds of technology "to be rejected with". but that's blaming the message medium for the message. -rejection is only ONE kind of message among the thousands of others that gets sent across those technologies.

and to be told: ...No one is connecting on any humane level, no empathy can flourish this way making violence and killing that much easier...

is just bullshit being spewed out by more old farts who 'don't get it' i see it as the modern version of "rock and roll is devils music and is destroying our youth" don't the many emails you send out about wolf killings, wild cat havens, recycling, and the others people have about environment, Darfur refugees, land-mines; "connect on a human level"? don't they generate empathy? would you even know about sarah palins wolf killing spree if it wasn't for one of those "7 different technologies"? and if you did find out, it would likely be after the fact. and how in the world they can claim this makes killing and violence that much easier? that has always astounded me. yes, they can always dig up the few people who played Grand Theft Auto all day and then went and shot someone cause it was just like in the game. yeah, and dan white shot harvey milk because he was high on twinkies.

but, back to twitter. can you remember, when you were a teen ager especially, that you would call up one of your friends and say "hey, what are you doin?" that's what twitter is. if you have friends, it's interesting. if you don't, you can make friends and follow them around.

go have a look at http://twittervision.com/

and tell me you have "no connection on a human level" to anything anybody across the WORLD says in a tweet.

the really cool thing that everybody forgets is that like the OFF button on a TV, you don't HAVE to be involved, don't have to tweet, don't have to use all 7 technologies. choose the ones you like and understand. everybody else will go on with the rest.

Re: Wine and beer

recieved in an email:

"To my friends who enjoy a glass of wine.and those who don't.
As Ben Franklin said:
In wine there is wisdom,
In beer there is freedom,
In water there is bacteria.
In a number of carefully controlled trials, Scientists have demonstrated that if we drink 1 liter of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of Escherichia
coli,..." etc

indeed in medieval times, where water was REALLY shitty, they drank copious quantites of beer and wine. E.coli is like everywhere, so is chloroform (sp) bacteria- did you see the mythbusters where they tested toothbrushes that were left in the bathroom at different distances from the toilet, to see if flushing spread bacteria? they were amazed that the toothbrush they had as a "control" that was out in the shop also tested positive.

after all the pain and heartache that the whole alcohol culture caused in my life, i am no longer enamored with it. i personally don' enjoy drunk monkeys, drunk people and the like. realize i'm talking FOR ME only. i guess it's kinda like when you have a "special needs" child, you dont think retard jokes are funny anymore. well, not exactly, it's more like i find it rather boring. definitely one of those things in life i've "been der, done dat". i do still appreciate that what others do is up to them, and it was and still is fun- for them.

i do believe part of my distancing from drug culture is a defense- it's not something that i need to be thinking is cool, or funny, or fun, or worthwhile. if you could guarantee absolutely, that something like what happened the night before sea fair 1983 would NOT happen*, perhaps... but there is only one way to guarantee that isn't there? and that is:

don't take the first one. ever.

*i drank a fifth of whiskey, punched out the windows of my van, assaulted my wife, got beat-up, almost arrested... you know, just having fun. the whiskey was supposed to be for the next day. i opened the bottle to "have just one"

Re: 090317 Thaikarl - Ho Chi Min City redux

from an email reply to my travelogue http://www.thaicountrylife.com : 

"Sounds like a great time ****. It is weird that I have purple hair and no life. Usually those are things people do when they have everything else in place, then dye your hair purple …not the other way around. No job, no clue, no friends, no mate, no future….but hey, I have purple hair."

so get a life.

so easy for one who has one (sorta) to say.  i hate it when people do that.
but i absolutely grokk what you are saying.  i attribute some of it to getting older.  to many installed patterns, to much experience.  we know what we like, know what we don't like, and can "pre-think" something else, base on our established patterns of like/dislike.  and thus decide not to bother, cause we already decided we won't like it, or maybe we would, but who cares? as we're older, we have a lot more "bin dere, done dat"s.  the young people seem to have all the fire, the angst, the passion- cause they don't know any better, or any worse.  i've tasted every jam and jelly on the shelves and out of the 50 or so flavors and variations, i like smuckers low-sugar raspberry and appricot.  i have branced out to low-sugar strawberry last year.  that's what i like, that's what i know, so i don't even think of looking at anything else.  expand that to hundreds of patterns and tastes life has to offer, and it's a very narrowed down life.  in it's regularity and sameness, there is a comfort, but at the same time there's a sense of nothingness.  of non-life.

and then, because i had all this money in the bank, and only two weeks vacation,i got on a plane and went to india for a week, and thailand for three days.  BAM! all that sameness, all that comfort, all that regularity was pushed aside.  it had a large dent in it now.  holes and cracks that let out the forces within, shone new light.  of course, i fell right back into the groove when i returned to america, to seattle, to capitol hill, but the cat was out of the bag, the worm had turned, the pot had boiled over, the fire had been lit.  eighty percent of life is "just show up".  i showed up in india and thailand, and it changed the other twenty percent.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

i also seek to be transformed.  not into a gigantic insect, but in to a transformed man.  but how? it is something i've been stuck on for some years now. how would this "gotten life" be any different from the life i have now?  do i need to erase the patterns of experience, delete the a posteriori knowledge i have and replace it with what? more a posteriori knowledge.  same same, but different? or is such a quest fullfilled by "a priori" knowledge i don't have yet?  or do i?

tell you later.  i have to take a shower now, we have to goto town.  there's no food in the house.

cares,
nu