On Storytelling, or Something

Warning: Disjointed rant about journalism and new technology ahead. Proceed with caution.

It's been a couple of months since I joined Twitter, and I will admit--I still don't really understand it. I mean, I get it--sometimes it can be fun to devise a 140-character quip, and on occasion it transmits interesting information in my direction, as it did this afternoon, when Michael Kruse passed along this excellent Washington Post piece--irony alert!--on the long-term narrative story and its struggle for survival in the (gag) Age of Twitter. And in the story, Joel Achenbach quotes Dave Barry, whose work in the 1980's is the reason many of us now find ourselves stranded in this drowning business in the first place, and Barry, as he often did back then between jokes about exploding cows, manages to sum up my feelings in a single sentence. "You can't really read Twitters," Barry says, and it's true; my Twitter feed is just a random collection of musings and links, but it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't tell a story. It doesn't even reunite me with a mosaic of my past relationships, like Facebook. It just spits information and one-liners in my general direction. It's like reading a 600-page book composed entirely of non-sequiturs. It just gives me another reason to not work and to stare at my IPhone while watching television (the one place where narrative storytelling seems to be getting sharper).

There's a story in this month's Wired magazine about Twitter, and in it, one of the company's founders essentially admits that he has no idea what Twitter is supposed to be. Let me repeat that: He's the founder of the trendiest company on the Internet, and he has no idea what his company is supposed to be. That's where we are; no one has any idea of anything, and yet we are continually convinced that this is our future. But how the hell do we know what our future is if the people running our lives don't even know what it is they're giving us? Aren't we all just guessing at this point? And isn't Achenbach correct--wouldn't people rather engage with a story rather than a collection of random elements?

Recently, Joe Posnanski linked to an enhanced, interactive version of his Sports Illustrated story on Joe Paterno; it was kind of cool, all that secondary information presented in a snappy format, but I'll be honest--I couldn't even figure out how to access the original piece. It wasn't a reading experience. It was something else altogether, a (sometimes distracting) mosaic of elements that may have a place in our future, but couldn't even come close to replicating Posnanski's original piece. It was a lot of sound and fury, but I'm not sure what it signified. Maybe nothing at all.

On Embracing That Which You Despise

At the behest of my agent/girlfriend, I am deeply ashamed to unveil this link:

http://twitter.com/michaelweinreb

Now if someone will only inform me what all these strange characters signify, I will go about addressing the whole spectrum of modern human existence in disjointed sentence fragments.

On Tweets I'd Twitter Regarding Cable News, If I Tweeted

Tonight, I watched a ten-minute "debate," on CNN, about whether Fox News is truly "fair and balanced."
--
It was so Jabberwockian that somehow, Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker magazine, a generally sensible human (and the author of this most excellent book), wound up concurring with Sean Hannity.
--
Even Bay Buchanan was unable to conjure a single Xenophobic rant.
--
Then again, this is the first CNN segment I've watched in several months that did not directly involve Rick Sanchez encouraging me to express my opinion on the abortion debate in 140 characters.
--
Though all of this made me realize: I now turn to MSNBC for the screeds of Keef O. and the Tao of Tweety, and I turn to Fox to hear Glenn Beck bray about the Obamaclypse, and I turn to CNN for centrist technological pandering to young people who would only watch Campbell Brown if there were video of her water breaking on YouTube.
--
Except: Where do I turn for news? Like, when an Islamic revolution breaks out?
--
Oh, bless you, Huffington Post!
--
Arianna Huffington: "Everything on the internet is accelerated; we need to accelerate. ... You have to think of a company like Huffington Post more in dog years, than human years."
--
I concur: It is always best to handle the news like a McRib.
--
Mix all the parts together, even the inedible ones, and serve it up hot and slathered in a sweet Rob Thomas sauce.
--
Also, does this mean it's time to spay and neuter Alec Baldwin?