Sunday, March 22, 2009

Oscar Wilde 2.0

As Wilde famously said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Looks like that Wildeism has been dragged unceremoniously into the twenty-first century:

There are two stories out there this week about bloggers getting blocked from someone else's Twitter feed: TBogg was blocked from Michelle Malkin's feed, and Adam Serwer at The American Prospect was blocked from ABC's Jake Tapper's feed.

I can't get it out of my head: These are less-than-140 word bursts, invariable off the top of the author's head--and they typed them with their thumbs! And it's news that someone was cut off from a steady diet of this?

As John at Americablog observed:

Coulda been worse. They could have not cared about being banned.

Because apparently the only thing worse than being tweeted at is not being tweeted at.

Finally: A medium has come along to make blogging seem respectable--even stodgy. How long until Twitter is replaced by something even sillier--like subscribing to the real-time charting of one another's blood pressure or rectal temperature? (I shudder to think of what it will be called instead of "tweeting.")

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ever the lexical innovator Stephen Colbert created the past tense of having participated in twitter. From the Today show. . .

"Oh do you tweet?" Viera innocently asked Colbert. To which he responded with a coy, "I have twatted."

The set burst out into laughter while a shocked Viera was left stumbling for words.

"Oh my gosh, um well actually so have I," she said for some strange reason. And as the cameras rolled to a commercial you could hear a disgusted (or maybe she was upset) Viera mumble,"Oh my God."

Perhaps the next twitter is just a short strings of emoticons.