SIGN WITH AN E

Warning: soapbox moment

I woke up early today to get some work done before the “other” work took over the day (going to campus, teaching, marking). As usual, I spend my first cup of coffee trawling through my Google Reader and Twitter to catch up on the night’s news. Among these tidbits I found news that Heston Blumenthal et al. were now pledging to save the world. This is (interesting/odious/ridiculous) news, so I tweeted it.

A few hours later, paying attention to my Tweetdeck as I do, I noticed that two people whom I follow, and who I know follow me too (“disclaimer” [?]: one of them was my husband) tweeted the exact same piece of news.

Now the Philosophe and I have had numerous (philosophical) conversations about the business of re-tweeting, and the irritations that follow when people don’t observe the “rules”, which are really just the best-practice norms that we should be observing all the time: acknowledge your sources.

So I of course immediately thundered down on him that he had violated the code. To which, in his (just) defence, he said that he hadn’t seen that I had already tweeted it.

Fair enough. I imagine the other person hadn’t seen my tweet either. So it wasn’t a case of anyone not acknowledging their source, because that source was clearly not me.

But no. This is what irks me. For all the glory of Twitter as the news feed where you can filter out the crap and only pay attention to what you find worthy of your attention, what’s the point if you don’t actually pay attention to the people who you choose to follow? If there is “too much” out there, or if you are following too many people, then doesn’t that defeat the purpose?

Am I whining because I didn’t get my two minutes of re-tweet glory? Perhaps. But I’m much more concerned about this as a confirmation of the fact that social media platforms just encourage our narcissistic tendencies. Tweet tweet: as long as I’m making noise, who cares about the fact that someone else may be saying something which just may be worthwhile? (Or even the same bloody thing?) Is anyone actually stopping to think along the way?

From Neal Gabler’s very good, but depressing, essay on living in a post-idea world:

‘We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

Think about that.’

Like yesterday.

I was actually looking forward to yesterday, because well, it was Friday. Which meant final lectures of the week, which meant a nice evening with a friend to look forward to, followed by a weekend of quiet time for some “real” work.

First, it rained, and here is the umbrella that I should have had with me, but didn’t:

Yes, it rained so much that I even contemplating cancelling the night out, and turning it into a nice night in instead. Fire, red wine, and good food, without having to go anywhere. That would have been nice. But my friend likes ‘out’, so we headed out, like people *should* on a Friday night. We even got adventurous and went to a restaurant neither of us had tried before. We drank nice wine and I ordered an ostrich burger which was just what I felt like.

The burger was full of gristle. I had two bites. The onion rings were nice though.

Then I came home, while my friend went off to a fancy dress party dressed like a demon. (She wore cool black wings.)

But I couldn’t get in because someone had bolted the door from the inside. Since it wasn’t me, and since the Philosophe is attending peace talks in Oslo, I fairly quickly deduced that this was bad news.

So I phoned the cops and waited hopefully outside for them to pitch up in the next five minutes to rescue me, and to get me into my home.

I ended up sitting in my car for an hour.

When I finally got inside (escorted by armed forces), it looked just like it does in the movies when someone walks into their house to find it has been ransacked and burgled. That was pretty sucky.

So were the next few hours, of statements, and locksmiths, and trying to find sleep many hours after my bedtime.

This morning: fingerprint detectives, insurance claims, and trying to figure out which detergent best removes the dirty feeling of strangers having rummaged through your stuff.

I know that it could have been worse than it was, and I’m glad that it wasn’t. But for a Friday, I think I deserved better. So to the idiots out there who can’t get into my laptop anyway,