To Tweet or not to Tweet?

The other day, my dad and I were watching the news (CNN possibly), and at the end of the broadcast, the [male] anchor (in a move that is becoming more common and less likely to evoke giggles) said, "Be sure to follow the rest of the story on Twitter as it evolves." My dad (who talks to the t.v. quite a lot) offered the following bit of wisdom: "No grown man should have anything to do with anything involving the word "twitter." I concurred, as I always do with dad's edicts. Issues of manhood as they relate to digital status updates aside, however, the incident got me thinking further about my own attitudes toward various digital media.

Twitter has become a topic that has woven itself in and out of discussions in my multimedia writing class--I may, unintentionally, have poisoned the class's attitude toward microblogging in showing everyone the "Trouble with Twitter" video--perhaps, though, there are a few closet tweeters in the bunch who will (I hope) prevail and continue to microblog. I say go for it--it's all good.

Anyway, I started wondering just why it is that I am so sure I will never use Twitter, and I came up with an answer--my life is simply too boring (not in a bad way--just not in a way that is worthy of updates that make me look as though I am breathlessly sprinting from one adventure to the next). Blogger blogging has much more to do with what I am thinking than what I am doing, and therein lies the issue. Twitter's prompt, which one cannot escape, is "What are you doing?"

And, really, even in face to face conversation, I hate it when people ask me, "So, what are you doing?" as if they are waiting for me to say something like, "Well, my first novel sold really well, I just got back from a safari, and I'm really big in Japan. (I have a dear friend who hates that question even more than I do, and her stock response is "Whatever the hell I want to.")

If I were an avid tweeter, here is what an average morning's tweet's would probably look like:

8:30--enjoying Cheerios with a banana
9:33--trying to find a matching pair of socks
10:02--giving up on finding a matching pair of socks and who cares anyway because they're all either navy or black and my shoes will cover them up
10:46--getting ready to go to Lamar

I think you see the problem...

But--what if Twitter's prompt were "What are you thinking?" Such might be the beginning of a fantastic tool for low stakes freewriting that would allow students/writers to update their thoughts (from their cell phones, keyboards, etc.--from anywhere at any time), preserve them, and come back to them later on in the quest to construct an essay from their piecemeal observations. Plus, their classmates would be more likely to "tweet" back and create some really interesting cross referencing discourse. Here's the bottom line--I am planning to pervert Twitter for my own purposes and use it in the service of prewriting.

Oh, Colossus, you nut!

In 1970, "The Forbin Project" emerged as the latest in a slew of technophobic films that, perhaps, considered itself prescient of the inevitable destruction of mankind in a world ruled by technology (i.e. the dominance of the big creepy "supercomputer"). In this clip, Colossus spews his personal philosophy ("man is his own worst enemy", bla bla bla) through a really primitive text-to-speech program. He (and I stress he--we'd probably be pretty hard pressed to locate early cinematic equivalents of the likes of Colossus or HAL that talk through female voices) threatens to annihilate the world with the help of "Guardian," his counterpart, a computer built by the Russians.



I don't think it will surprise anyone to know that this movie does not have a happy ending. Nonetheless, I do find the film fascinating in that it is based on the premise that we imbue our machines with our own will, conscience, and possible bent toward the destructive. Now, in 1970, which was not so long after the introduction of the ENIAC--the first computer that was so big it filled a room (no, seriously, stop laughing!)--people still considered technology to be not only something they could choose whether to interact with--but also something that had a scary potential to undermine human life. So, when this film first came out, though it was probably chilling on some level, its premise was still unrealistic.

However...

Today, as Donna Haraway argues, we are all "cyborgs" in the sense of having a connection (both mental and physical) to myriad technologies, some of which we do not even notice as being a part of us. Furthermore, as Kate Hayles compellingly explains, the aspect of "relationality" between us and our machines makes it more and more likely that they can mimic our thinking and decision making processes; thus, taking into account her theories, we can see Colossus's going rogue not as some sort of terrifying "fluke" or bug in the system, but rather as an actual reflection of his adoption of his human creators' traits.

Did this actually happen?

I could have called this post many things, one of which might have been "Early 80s Canadian educational television shows that scarred me for life," but I chose that title because a while back, something made a vague memory resurface of a program we used to watch in fifth grade called "Read All About It."



And I was thinking, did a show that dorky really exist? Didn't it revolve around some pre-adolescent time traveling kids who were always called on to defeat some "evil" nemesis called "Duneedon"? Naturally, I turned to YouTube to verify my hunch, and lo and behold, some gracious person has uploaded clips of seasons 1 and 2 as well as the openings (one of which you can see above--oh, that catchy theme song!) The show wasn't completely insufferable, because each episode was fifteen minutes long, and most of us were more captivated by those kids' accents [i.e. their pronunciations of words like house ("hoase") and about ("aboat")] than the plots.

In its own way, "Read All About It" tried to be "cool" by adding talking, thinking computers, "Otto" and "Theta" (cue pretentious critical theory-soaked references [informed by Hayles and Haraway] to human-machine symbiosis here). But this was back when the coolness of emerging technology lay in its clunky obviousness, not in its drive toward complete invisibility--therefore, our attention was constantly drawn to what one of the computers was "thinking" via its cacophonous print outs or Theta's mechanical voice, which said things like "We...refuse...to...comply...with...your...demands." There was something really Forbin Project about that whole situation (i.e. computers communicating with each other and with humans). This clip (mainly the first three minutes) is exemplary of how the two computers (with their strange loyalty to those annoying kids) exercised their human-like agency to thwart their enemy:



Here's another Canadian gem (an ancient clip of a program called "Bits and Bytes" which is trying to make painfully obvious the innerworkings of computer technology):



Maybe I really miss the days of "Read All About It," because that show represented a time when computers were computers and people were people, and we could all live in our comfortable binaries....nnnaaaahhhh!