Careful with that Tweet, Eugene

I often feel cast as an evangelist for Twitter for the simple act of defending it to people are so remarkably hostile to it. Inevitably, its critics say that they don't care what someone had for breakfast, dismissing its triviality. Evidently, the worst use of the tool invalidates it entirely, which doesn't make any sense. We don't assume cars are bad because drunks hit people with them, or that computers are bad because people do all sorts of creepy and disturbing things with them. If the poor use of an object or technology marks it as worthless and dismissable, there's little that we've developed that can stand the test. Fire? Bad.

Criticism in Twitterville

Michaelangelo Matos linked to this interesting conversation on music criticism in Twittering times. The piece begins:

One of the unfortunate side effects of the lack of critic culture: people are getting more stratified and separated in their listening habits. If you—if you read Spin or Rolling Stone in ‘96, you’d get an article on Nine Inch Nails, an article on Chemical Brothers, an article on Snoop Dogg—and, you know, the internet doesn’t work that way. If you’re into rap, you go to rap twitters. If you go into metal, you go to metal twitters. You know, bands build audiences for themselves! You just follow the bands you like. You don’t have to—you don’t stumble across this stuff, and that’s a problem! It’s harder to get exposed to things that aren’t in your comfort zone. I have friends that are so deep into indie rock that they don’t know what the fuck Katy Perry is, or Lady Gaga, and these are, like, the most ubiquitous songs in the country!

An interesting, logical observation that a check of anyone's iPod says isn't true. Listeners may read more or follow one genre more than others, but festivals and iTunes libraries say listeners aren't that stratified, and neither are critics. The second half of that, though - critics vs. the mainstream, if I read it correctly - there's something in that, but that's a tension that has likely existed since the dawn of modern music criticism.

... and there's a lot to think about in this post, more than I've excerpted.

The Art of Writing - D.O.A. Again

Can we all call a time out on the reflexive Twitter/Facebook bashing? I suppose it's the inevitable byproduct of the moment when the cable news networks discovered members of Congress and the Senate used Twitter, and suddenly the social networking tool was ubiquitous - each time said with the same sense of oh-so-delicious naughtiness that accompanies the knowledge that it's a W away from something randy. Still, the easy, fake opposition Larry Blumenfeld created in the lead for his coverage of Jazz Fest is typical:

New Orleans inspires even inveterate Twitterers and Facebook correspondents to release their thumbs and touch real life. Except the guy at the bar of a club called DBA one recent Monday, who just leaned harder into his BlackBerry, typing feverishly as Glen David Andrews—trombone in one hand, mic in the other—upped the tempo of "It's All Over Now." Some people just don't get it.

Evidently people who use Twitter and Facebook are so caught up with themselves and their artificial networks that life is passing them by. But similar concerns were expressed about email, message boards and the telephone - each signaled the death of civilized written communication as people chose some ephemeral form of communication over carefully drafted, hand-written letters. Such hand-wringing really does little more than make the writer seem like a scold as he/she harrumphs "Kids these days ...!" and in the process, removed from the culture he/she is speaking to.