I doubt I’ll start using it though. http://twitter.com/lenina

http://tinyurl.com/2vxzx5

Mmh. I do believe that there is a certain disposition that makes you immune towards some of those trends, but couldn’t say exactly what it is. For one: The self-imposed solitary confinement of completing a PhD certainly helps, as time really means something, namely within the continuum of your expanding horizons.

If I were a 9 to 8 office slave (like I once was) I’d probably be easy prey for twitter, because it might give me the illusion of winning back some of the personal time that I sold to my employer. Islands of time with me, though not exactly quality time in the educational sense.

I’ve never used any IM or Skype software in the way that one is apparently supposed to use it: log onto your computer and switch that damn thing own. I don’t like being interrupted while I work on something (although I am great at interrupting myself), but that’s not the actual reason. I don’t like people to see that I am online right now, or to appear to be approachable (email is different, thanks to the delay – no realtime) – although I am probably 6-12 hours online per day. I also prefer to have my cell phone set on mute – if somebody calls me, I can still call them back. That also means that I am not one of the ‘well-integrated’ individuals who have their cellphone glued to their ear most of their time, or who get an awful lot of phone calls.

The return on investment is a sense of integration – generally into the system of production, furthermore, cognitively, into a social network – quantity rules. I remember my boyfriend telling me about one of his US classmates (he went there for an exchange semester) who killed himself. He was the one who has the fewest friends on facebook. Have probably mentioned that before.

I can also remember that – when cellphones first came into fashion – I used to feel a bit embarrassed when I was at a café with a friend who was repeatedly being called by other, absent people on his/her phone, repeatedly interrupting our actual conversation. I hardly ever got a phone call, as the last person to whom I had talked over the phone was most likely the one sitting opposite me. So quantity can be seductive and induce envy if you are in a position where you are prone to be impressed by it – and most people are. Content is relatively irrelevant.

Regarding the lack of a rich textual representation – I guess the hierarchy is annulled in a twitter-to-twitter relationship. Furthermore, the twitter unravels over time – me screenshot is certainly a diminishing form of representation, because it omits the narrative that will inevitably unfold across several post, even if an individual post is characterized by a lack.

Main reason why Twitter isn’t here (in Austria, for instance) yet is probably only that they haven’t yet been able to make a deal with mobile communication providers – if the business model pays off, it’ll soon be here.

I’m a rather poor Pomo subject. I enjoy blogging, but can’t help having to force down feeling overexposed from time to time. The idea of sharing what I’m doing throughout the day seems radically uninteresting for the most part. Do my friends want to know that I’m yawning right now? Scratching my arm?

Either way, as you note, it doesn’t really matter what I’m doing–it’s all integrated into the system of production. The commodification of autotelic undergraduate chatter is what it looks like a bit. “Banal everyday life is invested by these models,” Baudrillard says. What is the return on this investment? A reply to one’s digital message in a bottle? The examples you capture are equally interchangeable. In other words, nothing is lost by switching statements from Vlu77 and rorakay. It’s just noise–except to the person making it. I worry about the way that this test (and maybe virtual signification as such) is not just less than enough to appreciate the radical otherness and sepcificity of other human beings (such appreciation being always a failed project from the outset–I guess I’m thinking of Levinas), but in fact the interchangeablility of twitters becomes the interchangeability of other people, dismissible, perhaps, in toto.

That’s dangerous, and unethical. Other people are knowable it tells us, and there’s not a lot to know. Therefore, as they lack the rich textual representation of a full consciousness for others to see, they always appear less than the person viewing their twitter. Any logic enabling people to be viewed as less results in a kind of violence to those persons.

Sure, it’s a problem with signification generally, but it seems that the short form of a twitter perforce restricts any sustained engagement with another person’s thought. “What am I doing” is less interesting than “What are we doing?” Maybe the blog enables more of a we?

It’s inteeresting that twitter has not made it to non-english shores. I’d like to believe that other people are less alienated and self-absorbed.