Technology and conversing with others

“I’m wont to do that” To change my site. My personal site.

Should I make it more professional, now that I’m more-or-less in the professional work? It’s like grad student is a real job title, and a really important one at that, but only like 0.1% of the population knows that, the .1% that’s in academia. And even grad students that are masters students who are here at University to maybe get a promotion at their boringass day job don’t actually know the prestige associated with being a real grad student. I may offend here by saying that these masters students, the ones who are taking their 6-8 courses and getting out without doing a thesis, are not graduate students, rather they are undergrad 2.0.

The problem is that I want to use technology to have a conversation with others, and I don’t think blogging, well especially not this form, is conducive to a back and forth.

I tried joining twitter to see if I might be able to bond with it. It seems like web 2.0™ is really all people communicating and so I dove in to this twitter thing, because I’m not entirely content with the communication that happens through blog posts. Facebook is an attempt, but just doesn’t do it for me. I don’t actually see the point of facebook. Ok I mean, I see the point, and I see why it’s sort of useful, but what about just for keeping up with pals who live in another country, or the same country but really far away? Maybe this is where, why twitter is onto a big thing. if it’s a big thing, I can’t make up my mind — mostly I think it’s just another progressive step, not the big thing yet. We don’t see the next thing coming, largely because it’s the next thing. But that’s also why we see it, because it makes sense, in the sense of progression of things. Blogs are great for occasional communication, the type of thing that works well with news, with product information, reviews, snippets of life from a conductor — things that typically don’t make up a person’s day to day life, things that one is willing to make a certain commitment to, because it’s a bit of work to write a blog post. Blogging, however, caught on because we all want to share that information with others and we want to read it about other for some reason. I mean, who doesn’t love to read about the sexcapades of some young hot thing? And who doesn’t want all their friends to know that they ate tuna on rye for lunch? I guess twitter has caught on cause you can share this b.s. without seeming pretentious.

I read reviews of modern literature. We’re talking serious fucking literature here and people say it’s pretentious. Great insight.
“It’s hard,
the characters fall flat,
the plot is boring,
Ann Rand is so much better.”
I mean people look, you gotta connect the dots before decrying this. Literature is supposed to be hard and twitter is supposed to bring a community together. The web 2.0 talks about books even.

And maybe twitter would be fun if my friends were on it and used it regularly and I could follow their lives. I’ve long said “I wish more of my friends blogged.” It’s a great way to keep up with people. To have a long-distance conversation, without the pains of actually talking to each other since you’re talking to anyone who’s interested. Facebook does a lousy job of this, and that may be where it fails. Blogs and livejournal do this, but writing a post seems daunting, whereas writing a 140 character beamed direct to anyone in the world tweet isn’t so scary. It’s like I could write
“Went for a walk — climbed a snow mountain to cross the road and wiped out in a mud puddle”
And I guess maybe that’d be interesting for a friend to read. It relays a bit of information:

1. Andy isn’t seriously overweight b/c he walks,
2. There’s still snow on the ground in Waterloo, and
3. Andy should watch his footing more carefully.

“It’s like meta-blogging hasn’t been cool since November 2004”

I wish all of you would become my friends on twitter