Life as a Succession of Tweets

Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles...

(Or tweets)

...Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer...

(Or through your Facebook Newsfeed)

...Every funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity...

(Which present themselves often, since you have both Twitter and Facebook Mobile on your Blackberry or iPhone)

...A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential. Where a story no longer follows as a result of an experience. Now the experience happens in order to generate a story. Sort of like when you suggest: 'Lets not but say we did.' The story--the product you can sell--becomes more important than the actual event.

These excerpts are pulled from Chuck Palahniuk's (Fight Club) collection of true stories Stranger than Fiction, specifically from the article "You Are Here." He's cast his lens on the hopeful masses at the Midwest Writers Conference (or Writers of Southern California Conference or the Georgia State Writers Conference) trying to hawk off their painful/inspiring stories to book publishers-slash-movie producers. This was the 1990s' brand of narcissism.

Now we have Twitter. As easy as it was back then to produce a "best of" NFL highlights of your life, "organizing and making all that flotsam and jetsam make sense," now it's even easier.

The last five years of your life (assuming you were an early-adopter) have been chronologically sorted for you on Facebook--you can scroll through the photos like a researcher flipping through reams of microfilm. You can look back on your bygone youth, and sigh with a bittersweet mix of nostalgic longing ("Besides, all our best adventures seem to be behind us.")

Everyone else can too. In a few minutes, I can keep pressing "next" until I've digested your entire life story, 1,000 words at a time. Bam! I know you as fast as it takes to scan your "About Me" section ("...loves Pulp Fiction and Winston Churchill quotes--me too!")

But not so fast! Recall that everything here has been packaged for the marketplace. Yes, this is not a profile page of 21-year-old John Doe, it is John Doe™. If John is savvy, he's framed his page to achieve a desired brand image, with maximum market penetration. If John is really savvy, he knows that pictures make the cyber-man. If John is really really savvy, he knows that it never happened if its not snapped and uploaded by his peer paparazzi the next day. So what does John Doe do?

Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.

John consciously pushes for that optimal crazy-sexy-cool moment, captured with impeccable timing (or luck) by a Sony Cyber-shot®. And that moment, that experience, is transformed into a profile picture. It is a highlight. It is a hot commodity now in the Economy of Attention. It was the whole purpose of the experience in the first place. Will it go viral? Will John get his 15 seconds of fame (15 minutes being a tad bit ambitious in the age of 140-word character limits).

If the ploy is successful, John will get the attention he craves. To what end? Perhaps in the beginning it was to enhance his actual, flesh-and-blood social life. These days, though, its an end in itself. Why get laid when all you need is to have everyone think you're getting laid? These days, one's social life apotheosizes to the level of Facebook hyperreality, or reality by proxy.

Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. It is the simulation of something which never really existed. - Jean Baudrillard

Facebook is all appearance, a fast-food social life. No matter how many Facebook status updates, wall posts, messages, pokes, comments, or counter-comments you ingest, you aren't sustained. You don't get that essential holistic effect achieved by a good lunchtime conversation, or a hug, (or actually getting laid).

Twittering then is fast-food self-expression. Doubtless, each medium has its own elegant forms of mastery, and the inguistic economy of the "tweet" no doubt challenges the writer (viz haikus). However, the sheer volume and ease of Twitter publishing cheapens the output. Even worse, the medium is invading our everyday speech and thought.

When people start to think and communicate in texts and tweets over exchange and expression, well... it will be the sort of revolution that won't be televised, but it will be archived (on Ashburn- and Santa Clara-based internet servers).