Categorical Aperitif

Man, dday could not be more right about the Beltway media/political elite's new devotion to Twitter, a technology that seems to me to be a big step backward informationally speaking—only 140 characters at a time? most intelligent people I know need more space just to clear their throats, let alone to communicate anything worth reading—but then these are Politico types we're talking about.

Usually DC gets these things 4-6 years after the fact, like my grandparents' rural small-town radio station ("Coming up, music from a hot new band called The Who!"), but Twitter allows the chattering class the double pleasure of maxing out on their Blackberry usage, along with being forcibly constrained by time and space to definitively not talk about anything of import whatsoever. "John Edwards' haircut ZOMG LOLZ" fits the format; an analysis of proposed USDA country-of-origin labeling policy doesn't. And the structure of having "followers" surely appeals to Village types. All in all, it's better than passing notes in junior high! Actually, kind of the same thing!

Yes, I know that many people use it for ITunesing and YouTubing and whatnot, but let's face it: the real glory of the internet is its ability to transmit text quickly—lots of it, and with great convenience. It allows us to get the entire New York Times, or pretty much any newspaper anywhere in the world, or any magazine, or scholarly journal, or blog, or government database, right onto our computers anytime we want: mountains of oft-informative text at the touch of a button. Yet these supposedly elite people think tweeting is cool.

That sound you hear is Neil Postman howling with laughter in the great beyond.