Twitter, Touretter, It's All The Same To Me

I read an article this morning that got me to thinking once again about social media, and the manner in which they are deranging society, and particularly young folk.  To my mind, it’s gotten so bad, that my interest borders on obsession, but can you blame me?  In an earlier day, I would have been the guy near the end of the Roman Empire who was saying “Seriously people, do you suppose we could dial back on the drunken orgies just a little bit and pay a damn minute of attention to our borders?” 

That is where we’re at with Social Media and hand held devices.

The article that provoked this meditation was titled Study: Facebook Will Lose 80% Of Its Users By 2017.  The authors reached this conclusion by using the same mathematical models for Facebook that were used to chart the progression of plague-like diseases.  The analogy is certainly apt, but if in fact the precipitous crash of Facebook and other social media happens, it will be for distinctly non-disease like reasons. 

Diseases eventually decline because of the concept of saturation: simply put, once every susceptible to a disease is infected, there’s nobody left to get infected.  In the case of social media, though, there is as of yet no indication of saturation, particularly amongst the young.  Part of the reason these trends haven’t peaked is the rapid evolution of the technologies.  There has simply never been a baseline against which to measure the phenomenon in order to determine if it’s pathological in its effect. 

Think about it: At the start of the Social Media era just twenty-odd years ago, all we had was kludgy old E-Mail, which has simply an electronic version of regular mail: Text oriented with limited multi-media capabilities, labor intensive if you wanted to distribute your message to a wider audience, and likewise for recipients to do a mass reply.  Bottom line, there were physical constraints to putting a mass message out to the world, although it did have the advantage of providing a message with limit as to length.

The first web-based social media outlets were the likes of MySpace and Facebook, offering limited messaging capability, but with text, pictures, video, the IQ-destroying "Like" function – and most nefariously – a utility for connecting with hundreds if not thousands of other Users with a minimum of effort.  This single feature lobotomized social intercourse more surely than the “boob tube” ever could: Provided the opportunity to have a list of 50 “friends” versus, say, 500, most people chose the larger group.  This was true mostly because Users immediately grasped that a friends list was not just Friends, but an audience.  And in the early days, a larger Friends list was thought to be innocent and consequence free.

With the evolution from personal communications like E-Mail to a distributed platform like Facebook, it was incredibly easy not only to inflict your every thought and gripe on a group of "Friends", but play games, post photo albums, gorge on your Friends' every post, create alternate realities like Farmville just in case real life got too messy, and otherwise create an online presence that made your every flaw visible to the world: And all of it within a communications framework that literally made conversation impossible. 

Next we were on to Twitter, which cleverly limited the text message to 140 characters and wasn't fussy at all about grammar, thus sustaining the self-esteem of Millennials educated in public schools.  Twitter is without a doubt the primary outlet for the Idiocracy: folks with absolutely no clue, a heroin-like addiction to the attention of others, and a ton of disposable time and income.  Just ask Justin Bieber or Paris Hilton: http://tinyurl.com/EpicTwitterFail.  Hashtag this, you numbskulls.

Since then, social media have gotten increasingly specialized.  There's Pinterest, a site I am convinced was built by women, for women, and whose sole purpose is to allow them to scrounge the Internet for an endless supply of home and personal improvement ideas designed to ensure that their husbands and boyfriends have zero free time.  There are no more dread words in a relationship than "Honey, look what I found on Pinterest!"  Of course, real life is always messier than the virtual perfection on line, but hey, don't take my word for it: http://epicpinterestfail.com.

Finally, we come to pictographic sites like Instagram that marry a smart phone camera, a short attention span, limited technical ability and the underdeveloped cerebral cortex of the key 14 to 24 demographic that allows them to make complete asses of themselves - with pictures - in mere seconds.  Those of us with some perspective see "Selfies" for what they really are: a record of excruciatingly embarrassing and consequential moments broadcast to the world on a whim; Post-Millennials see them as real-time projections of their personal awesomeness.  How else to explain the epidemic of nudies broadcast to the world by disgruntled ex-boyfriends?  Seriously Girls?  Next to "I love you" and any declaration that includes the words "everybody's doing it", the least believable thing your boyfriend will ever tell you is: "For Reals Babe, this picture/video is just for me". 

Where does it all end?  The answer is, it doesn't.  Given the trend-line, the next evolution of social media will have even shorter messaging capabilities, will necessarily be more vulgar, and will take inappropriateness to a whole new level.  It will at once be incoherent, louder and ruder than anything that has come before.  The messages themselves will be much more stream-of-consciousness, ejaculations that are a direct connection between the brain and the mouth, unfiltered by the Id. 

The only logical name for this site is "Touretter.com”, which is why I have just reserved the site on GoDaddy.  Come the next wave, I'm going to cash in big time.  "Fuck!  Shit! Raspberries!": pictures attached.

The “Touretterverse” is inevitable, and, the lexicon will have yet another term that documents our slide into oblivion.