Inner Solace

I tried to submit a usability bug to @GQAustralia.  I don’t think it worked.  Yes, I was being silly and making a reference to xkcd.

And I was reading the interview with Ryan Kwanten, if you must know.

America’s Tweethearts | vanityfair.com (via disoriented)

I just read this and I can’t help but feel how condescending the VF article was.  Sure the only person I know of in it is Felicia Day, but some things from the article made me wonder what the writer actually thought of the people they were calling tweethearts.

The writer referred to them constantly as ‘girls’, when they’re aged 26 to 30 and they work for a living.  How old are you, grandmother who penned the article? 36.

On Twitter, she wrote it “doesn’t even require real sentences, only a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver.”. While this is true, “doesn’t even” paints some definite bias towards how one should feel about the people she is writing about[1].  On the people she describes as tweethearts, “It so happens that they are nice girls—the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders”[2].  Is that all they are, ‘nice cheerleaders’?

What about talking about their achievements, or what actually makes these people popular or tweethearts other than their multitudes of followers? Popularity just doesn’t spring out of thin air.

The author writes, “the act of text-messaging the world [snip] is the essential feat of a twilebrity”. Well.. no. There are a couple factors that make a ‘twilebrity’.  Being able to text message isn’t actually one of them, it’s just a medium.  I mean check out @ActuallyNPH’s starting tweets.  They technically didn’t fit within the 140 character mark, but his ability to get his meaning and sense of humour across despite his truncated messages suggests some level of communicative skill, not simply an ability to text message.

Aside from prior celebrity, content is what keeps people coming back, not just the ability to jam 140 characters or less into some semblance of a message.  Not the “droppings” the writer mentions such as “getting highlights before class,” “I hrd u had fun!,” “Wah, missing my twittr time!”.  If that is all these people are tweeting, I’m not entirely sure how they managed to get and keep their several hundred thousand to 1.6 million followers.

I don’t care how much of a fan I am of their work, if that is all someone was tweeting… well, there’s only so much faecal tweet matter one can handle.  And most of us get more than enough spam a day without inflicting ourselves with more inane day-to-day messages from people we don’t know personally.

Or perhaps I missed that the point of the article was only about critiquing twitter as a new media source and its relation to real-time web (oh and how many articles have we seen about that already) rather than about the tweethearts the article title suggests it is about.

[1] And I am suddenly reminded of the way the outcast describes or perceives the in-crowd in those teen movies. Just as an aside.

[2] A bunch of pretty girls who call out short and witty messages with no real depth to improve morale.  Well that clears things up.

Big Ben Clock on Twitter (via IDEA*IDEA)

^_^

TweetMyMac Remote Controls Your Mac via Twitter (via Lifehacker)

There are a few commands they’ve rigged into this thing, but the two which intrigue me the most are: say and isight which will allow you to remotely make your Mac speak a phrase and take a photo using the isight respectively.

In the event of theft of your beloved laptop, I can see the isight feature possibly coming in handy, and I suppose you can abuse your thief using the say command but that would possibly alert them to the fact you might have snapped their photo.

But then again, using this method to recover stolen property also depends on whether the thief is stupid enough to hook it up to the internet with all your gear still installed…

Then again, again, there was that story of the person who was able to use a similar feature on mobileme to photograph her laptop thief. So it’s not entirely inconceivable.

Just Another Day At The Office For Arnold

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Twitter: “I do still have the Conan sword, and I keep it in my office. Here’s a picture.”

(via BuzzFeed)