By Tobin Barnes
“I don't need to know how long your
newborn is. I'm not a baby tailor.”
Har!
And here’s another one:
“I know making good time is important, but if Indiana Jones is
beating people up on your vehicle, I say slow down and pull over.”
Again
Har!
Those are a couple of Tweets by Tim
Siedell @badbanana that I have “favorited” at one time or another and thereby
saved for I don’t know how long. No one will tell you that, but they will tell
you that bad stuff about you on the Internet will last for eternity. But then
again, maybe things on the Internet have a half-life like nuclear waste.
 |
Here’s
another one I favorited by Molly McAleer @Molls: “I would buy you a clue if
they made them in your size.”
Yeah,
another good one; that is, if you are me. But maybe this kind of wit isn’t up
your alley. And that’s the thing about social websites. Most of the stuff you
run into on sites like Twitter is, to put it bluntly, complete crap.
Same
goes for the other social websites—mostly chaff without many kernels of wheat.
A guy’s got to wade through a lot of sludge to find the occasional thing of
interest.
Take
Twitter, for instance…as long as we started there. I bet I scroll through at
least thirty Tweets before I get a Har! or even a Huh!
I
should have better things to do than wasting my time on such an unprofitable
slog. Or anyway, you’d think so, but I guess I don’t.
So
what’s with the other twenty-nine Tweets that contained absolutely nothing for
me? People obviously wrote them thinking at least one someone else, somewhere
would find them interesting.
And,
well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the Internet in a nutshell. There’s
something for everyone, just not necessarily where you’re looking at any given
particular moment.
Same
thing can be said for the mega-beast of social sites, Facebook. Sorry to say, despite
the fact that the entries on Facebook are put there by my “friends,” most of
them—again being blunt—aren’t of much interest to me.
Of
course, my “friends” who are doing the posting have many friends other than me,
oftentimes hundreds of them. (By the way, how many “friends” is too many?) And maybe
those uninteresting posts, from my perspective anyway, were actually meant for
some of their many other friends and not me.
So,
okay. I get it. The majority of what’s on my social sites isn’t meant for me in
particular, given my stodgy, less-than-all-encompassing nature.
But
why shouldn’t it be? What with all the algorithms (I had to look up that
spelling) and whatnots and scientific digital gobbledygook, something amazing should
be out there eliminating all that chaff-like stuff from my online horizon.
Yeah, please spare me the snoozers. Just give me the info only I want.
And
the Internet should certainly know what I want by now.
Through
cookies, spiders, and I-don’t-know-what-all, cyberspace has been watching my
every digital move like a celebrity stalker for decades now, and I’m no
celebrity. It knows my sites, my “likes,” my favorites, my smiley faces, and
heck, who knows? It might even be looking at me through that little camera on
the computer whenever it wants, although I can’t imagine when and why that
might be.
As
we’ve just learned in the news, the government can do amazing things with
so-called metadata like this. With relatively insignificant bits like phone
numbers and time spans it can supposedly stop 9/11 knockoffs and other
nefarious deeds planned by evildoers.
So
why can’t all this metadata be used to perfectly customize my content? Why can’t
it be used to give me ONLY stuff like this on Twitter:
“When
my phone says ‘searching,’ I hold it to my heart & whisper ‘Me too, phone,
me too,’ then burst into tears.” lauren caltagirone @MrsRupertPupkin
“Millions of people firmly believe that I
wrote every word of the Bible... yet they still haven't bothered to read it
all.” almighty god @almighty god
“Art
Thief Will Not Have To Return 125 Clown Paintings” and “Watchdog Group Says
Mailmen Pose Biggest Threat.” CabbageNews @CabbageNews
“It's
not that I don't like you. I mean, it's not that I DO like you, but....” Le Ms.
@debihope
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