In writing all of that, I did get to thinking a little bit about why (relatively) intelligent and well-adjusted people are totally comfortable with our behavior on Twitter (at least until its absurdity is temporarily called out, as above). The answer may be that it isn’t, in fact, that absurd after all. For people who live their lives at the leading edge of consumer technology, our signal:noise ratio in daily life is rapidly approaching Infinity. Is it possible that the human condition demands some degree of noise to have a balanced life — think about it, a life in which nothing is random or serendipitous (i.e. all signal) doesn’t sound too fun. Eliminating the noise in meatspace<\/a> can practically only go so far, but in cyberspace, where our kind now spends most of our time, the vast majority of products and services have been designed to give you nothing but signal. Twitter (and to a certain degree other social software, like the Facebook newsfeed) can theoretically be adjusted to be all signal, but the entropy of its design tends towards providing you with noise, be it noise of your choosing. Maybe Twitter is the cyberspace equivalent of one of those sleep machines that emits white noise to help you sleep at night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only something this tasteless could truly capture the frivolity of the compulsive Twittering that afflicts me and many of the people I know. Deep-down, we all know we could never get away with this level of self-important blather in any other communication medium (well, other than lifecasting, of course). But as long as others keep … Continue reading “The Absurdity of Twitter”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,129],"tags":[146,145],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lolz","category-interwebs","tag-hitler","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40,"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}