HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS TWITTER THING?

So, the co-author of this blog and I have been out of the country for a while on a decidedly non-minimalist vacation. This morning I thought I'd take a minute to see what's going on with our friend Mr. Bogue, and...

It seems he's finally outgrown/out-crazied the whole "minimalism" thing and is now a "cybernetic yogi". How very postmodern! He has officially disowned minimalism and revamped his image. Ev is now officially a man of the future. He even left Facebook! OMG. What's he doing instead of Facebook, you ask?

Twitter. Which is completely different from Facebook and does not in any way represent the death of Western civilization.

I joined Twitter way before it was cool (I want to say 2006) but decided that it sucked so I hardly ever used it. Maybe it sucked because, way back then, nobody was using it, and nothing interesting was being said. Or maybe it sucked because there is really nothing interesting you can say in 140 characters or fewer. Reducing oneself to short, pithy statements is Communication Lite™. It's just the next step before Newspeak. I fucking hate it. It oversimplifies things. Also, when you look at someone's feed (PS, the terms "tweet" and "feed" kind of make me barf) a large chunk of what you see is his or her responses to other people's tweets, and that is just annoying. Why would you want to see half of a conversation? It's like overhearing some asshole talking on his cell phone on the bus. He's not saying anything interesting, and you don't have much of a context for it unless you can hear the person on the other end of the conversation. But you're still listening.

Everett Bogue has recently exploded with love for Twitter and hatred for everything else; he goes so far as to claim that "cyborgs" communicate only via Twitter and face-to-face. It's a way more postmodern way of living than my "Friendster and pagers ONLY!!!!!!1" lifestyle. And that bubble's totally never going to burst. Twitter will never go the way of Myspace or any other social networking website. IT'S JUST NOT POSSIBLE. IT'S THE BASIS OF ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THIS WORLD.

Or, as Bogue says, it rivals the development of language in the evolutionary history of the human race.

Yeah. There's really no other website that can possibly put you in touch with countless like-minded individuals from around the world. I can say with some certainty that Twitter is not unique, as Bogue orgasmically proclaims it to be. It's like a chatroom, but not necessarily in real time, and with asinine character limits. It's stupendously unimpressive. It's the internet, but smaller. I've met a lot of people online - I've been an internet dork since the late '90s - including some of my best friends and my husband, none of whom I would ever have met without the internet.

So yeah. WOO INTERNET. But seriously, Twitter? It's the wave of the future, just like Pepsi Clear and WebTV and the Walkman. Something new will come along, and all the Everett Bogues of the world jizzing their pants over Twitter's onetime grandeur will have to come up with an excuse to disown it, just like they disowned Facebook and minimalism and non-designer jeans.