Roll Your Own Panopticon Society

March 24th, 2007

What am I doing right now? Typing this line.

What am I doing right now (approximately three-five seconds later)? Typing this line and thinking about getting another Capris Sun drink-sac to pierce and drain.

What am I doing right n–

WHO FUCKING CARES?! Why should the second-by-second, minute-by-minute minutiae of my extraordinarily average, unexciting life mean ANYthing to you?

And yet…there is a new website, yclept Twitter, which has been gaining quite a bit of notice lately–and its purpose is simply to answer the question “What am I doing right now?” by allowing users to keep a running log of…well, whatever the hell they’re doing at that particular moment. Por ejemplo, let’s take a look at the site right now (2459 on 23 March 2007) and see what’s happening….

User bogomo has just posted something in one of those unintelligible Asian hieroglyphics that no one on earth but other Asians can understand.

Be-bearded and smiling user bear poses the question, “cygwin, o cygwin — how can it be that I love you and also hate you[?]”

Crow simply notes that he/she/it is “Watching Mario Batali–oh, it;s [sic] off.”

And, finally, shtikl ponders the Jack-Handeyish Deep Thought: “Is this Twitter Zen?” But, of course, does not offer up an answer or any form of followup thought…because that’s not what Twitter is all about. Substance? Reflection? Commentary? Intelligence? Such things are beyond Twitter’s purview.

To get a more thorough appreciation of the colossal pointlessness and stultifying banality of Twitter, let’s have a look at the above-mentioned Zen questioner shtikl’s posts over the last few days, as cut’n'pasted directly from his Twitter page:

Drinking Ayurvedic Tea ‘Nirvana’ w/ Soy Milk, drawing new Shtikl Cartoon while Elli and Baby are still asleep. 8 minutes ago from web

“baking” pre-baked bread-rolls in the mini-oven for the family. preparing new Shtikl for the world! about 24 hours ago from web

reading: JPod by D. Coupland (Late, I know. Still.) 11:47 AM March 21, 2007 from web

twitter is still 20% ’bout coffee 11:00 AM March 21, 2007 from web

@ado: one of my favorite lines in music, (by the band Garbage, I think): The trick is to keep breathing! (Sorry for the pun…) 10:01 AM March 20, 2007 from web

@Scobleizer: HR may rock, BUT: With 25 contacts (the free version) it is useless, the next bigger version is 144 Dollars a year–come on! 07:42 AM March 20, 2007 from web in reply to Scobleizer

I am Robert Scoble’s newest friend! Whoooot! Yeah! Hello Scobleizer! :-)) 07:07 AM March 20, 2007 from web

Hooray, finished the paper on ‘Augustine 05:34 PM March 19, 2007 from web

I’m not watching, I’m not watching. [Covering eyes. What is the visual equivalent to ‘BLA BLA BLA’?] 09:07 AM March 19, 2007 from web

The next minute just became this minute, will soon be a minute ago. 08:52 AM March 19, 2007 from web

Wow. “The next minute just became this minute, will soon be a….” That is deep, man.

Yeah. About as deep as a goddamned sheet of paper. The text on a shithouse wall is positively epic in comparison to the monodimensional drivel that people scrawl all over Twitter.

Mind you, Twitter’s purpose is, indeed, almost Zen in its simplicity: it exists only for the purpose of letting people keep a tally of events in their lives–and, to be fair, it does that brilliantly. I loves me a well-built website regardless of its purpose. Twitter gives users a plethora of means by which they can post: via a typical web form, via cellphone, via Post-It notes stuck into empty Coke bottles and left on appropriate streetcorners for all I know. The design of the site is elegantly simple, too: very easy to navigate, and intuitive to grasp…as one would only expect from a site whose purpose is, ultimately, to reduce its users to brainless babblers for whom even MySpace and LiveJournal are simply too complex.

Y’see…Twitter is institutionalized Adult ADD. In effect, it reduces the concepts of both blogging and social networking to their most stripped-down, minimalistic, skeletal natures…paring away any and all meaning and leaving little more than bitesized chunks of barren text. I call it microblogging. That is, blogging for those who really have absolutely nothing to say but simply must take part in the expanding universe of the Social Web. And what better way to let the shallow take part than by providing them an “in” as simple and as undemanding of their miniscule intellects as possible?

But…why?! Why would anyone think it a Good Idea to spatter the Web (or, at least, this one little corner of it) with such trivial blather in the first place? And why would other people want to keep an eye on their fellows’ and total strangers’ trivial blather?

Because we’re living in a burgeoning panopticon society. The original “Panopticon” was a prison designed by social and criminological pioneer Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s to “allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a ‘sentiment of an invisible omniscience.’” In other words, someone’s always got their eye on you. Big Brother’s watching. Orwell’s 1984 depicts the stereotypical panopticon society in which citizens have no privacy and are observed at all times by elements of The State. In 1998, sci-fi writer David Brin published a landmark nonfiction work, The Transparent Society, arguing that traditional ideas of privacy are rapidly disappearing in the present age of cheap, ubiquitous surveillance technology–but, he notes, this is not a Bad Thing…because the same technology that Big Brother uses to watch you gives you just as much power to watch Big Brother.

Many of the ideas broached by The Transparent Society have already become accepted entirely by our society–or, at least, by the younger generations who are actively taking part in driving the cyber-boom of the Internet. Witness the continued success of MTV’s The Real World and other “reality-TV” programmes, in which “everyday” folks live out their lives before the camera eye. Consider the fact that millions of people worldwide have blogs, many of them accessible to anyone and everyone on the ‘Net, in which they gladly discuss aspects of their personal lives that my mother’s generation never, ever would’ve brought up in public. (Hell, there were things–y’know, like “S-E-X”–that they wouldn’t even discuss behind closed doors!) Notions of what information a person should keep “private” and what a person should make public are entirely culturally-defined, and those definitions are greatly in flux. And old-timey ideas of secrecy and privacy are crumbling.

Open-ness and transparency in democratic societies are generally Good Things, for reasons which I shan’t get into here, as they’re not particularly relevant to this argument. But, like all Good Things, they can be exploited by the smallminded and petty. Especially those folks–like Paris Hilton or, for that matter, Perez Hilton–whose lives revolve around attention-mongering.

People raised on Real World reruns don’t get nervous when cameras are pointed at them–they preen. The MySpace/Facebook generation doesn’t understand the concept of overexposure. Social networking is a wondrous concept that personalizes the power of the Web and redefines Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to apply to everybody. But it can just as easily devolve into nothing more than Popularity Contest 2.0. The same technology that lets me rediscover and stay in contact with long-lost relatives on the other side of the country, converse with my favorite musical artists, and stay abreast of upcoming Major Events (like weddings) in friends’ lives can also be used to engage in an ever-spiraling game of childish one-up-manship called “Who has the most MySpace friends listed?”

Several years ago, when LiveJournal was the New Big Thing, my friends and I signed up for accounts because we all loved the idea of being able to publish our own thoughts and comment on each other’s. LJ was, and still is, an excellent means of staying in contact with each other, sharing anything and everything from amusing links found while trawling the ‘Net to troubling affairs that could really benefit from others’ input. We’ve all made stupid, silly posts to our LiveJournals before–hell, I’ve a friend who regularly blogs his BMs (he calls it his Journal of Ass Production)–but for the most part, the material that we post to our journals is thoughtful or thought-provoking. Many of us now have official blogs of our own, such as this one, and we tend to follow the same rules for posting there as well: don’t waste everyone’s time with inane chatter. If you’re going to post something to a blog, post something that someone will want to read because it appeals to their mind, or their funnybone, or their boner, if pr0n’s their thing–but for gods’ sake, do NOT waste untold kilobytes on random stupidity.

My friends and I come from a slightly-older generation, though: a generation that had been thought to think before opening our mouths. To not put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) without having something to say first. We’re attention-seekers just like everyone else–I mean…why else would I have a domain all my own on which I post stuff like this for the delectation of friends and Total Strangers? We want our voices to be heard, just like anyone.

But when we speak, we say something. It may be a Portentous Statement on the sad state of American politics. It may be a quick’n'dirty analysis of a story from MSNBC concerning a polar bear cub and moronic “animal rights” activists. It may be a fart joke. Regardless of type of content, there’s some kind of content there for the edification or amusement or excoriation of our readers.

“Twitter twits,” on the other hand, are taking the easy way out: they’re posting stuff to the Web, sure–but it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Who gives a shit if you’re “out shopping wit the wife” at 8:04:13pm on 19 March 2007 or pondering “What bra sizes of the red0haired bitch on Desprate Hosewives [sic, sic, sick]?” These people have nothing of substance to say–but, oooooohhhh, do they crave the attention. They just want to be Real Life stars, too! But instead of setting up a webcam, whipping out a tit, and declaring themselves camwhores, or setting up a blog and actually writing something that comprises more than 20 words and makes a point of some sort…why, they just jump to Twitter, where all they have to do is cough up a handful of words n’ letters to describe “What are you doing now?” And SHAZAM! You have a web presence. You have defeated solipsism! You have PROVED YOU EXIST!

And all you had to do was take a few seconds to record a meaningless moment of your thoroughly-average existence.

So maybe someone, somewhere, will look at your latest post–”12,32 am just took a shit and there was corn in it”–and think to him/her/itself, “Wow, there’s someone whose crap I just have to keep up with!”

Perhaps if you actually had a life that matters, you wouldn’t need to bore the world with soundbites of it.

UPDATE: There is a program called Twitteriffic (shown here in 2.0 Beta screenshots) that gives users not only another means of posting their minute-by-minute inanities to the web, but lets them keep track of their friends’ inanities as well. Wow. Talk about a productivity murderer.