On occasion I give thanks to Al Gore for inventing the Internet. We have reaped the benefit many times over, and were it not for him, we would still be writing letters, making phone calls to friends, watching network news on television, and reading news in the newspapers. The Internet has inextricably changed us. I give thanks that I no longer need to sit with my family to watch the news or write tiresome letters to friends and family - now I sit alone in a room, send emails and look at news stories online. So much easier, more streamlined - and best of all no dirty hands from reading the newspapers.
The blog - a derivative of having web pages, made it easy to keep online journals, tell friends what it is you are doing at any given moment, link your favorite things so everyone can see them, and best of all, you don't have to actually see anyone - you can send it into the ether and someone in Nepal will read it.
Mr. Gore probably never realized what it was he had invented way back in the day. Today we know. Now we have Twitter, where everyone can, minute by minute, tell us what they are doing. The world's news is but a click away and not old news like on the news pages of the Internet, now this news is seconds old, by people at the place, doing the deed.
Now we can know within seconds of an event occurring anywhere in the world, and some of us have twitter send us updates on specific interests - wherever we are, whatever we are doing (eating, sleeping, potty breaks, sex) we can keep abreast of the latest events. And not to forget about those of us who don't care about events, we just want to keep in touch with friends - we can stay in touch with every friend we have and know virtually to the second what they are doing or thinking. How cool is that! Whether they are eating or sleeping or heading to the bathroom, we can know - and we can know what they think of whatever it is they are doing.
I do have a question and this has been raised before - back in the dinosaur days of CNN starting up - if we have become addicted to knowing and getting the latest, this second, this nanosecond of news and details ... what happens when we ask someone a question - say, will you marry me, and they have to think about it for a few days. What will that do to our ability to function.
There was a reason we didn't want to call our friends all the time. There was a reason we didn't want to know what our family was doing - many many many of us are borderline morons. I could care less what 80% of the masses have to say on anything. Nor do I ever want to know what you think about anything, if I did, I would most likely explain to you what your opinion should be and then we would both be happier, and wiser.
A recent study came up with a startling revelation concerning twitter (and us):
Forty percent of the messages on Twitter are "pointless babble" along the lines of "I am eating a sandwich now," according to a study conducted by a US market research firm.
Pointless babble. How revelatory, and very representative of virtually everything that has oozed out of Al Gore's mouth for the last 20 years.
[And before you go on to expplain how Gore didn't invent the internet, he was misunderstood, that he was not clear, and it was unfair to continue this misstatement - I would remind you of eight years of liberals, and their misquoting Bush / taking out of context / lying about what he said, or did not say, and then perpetuating that lie years later.]
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