So, today Christine Tracy drove me from Grand Rapids to Ypsilanti (what the hell kinda name is that, anyway?), where Eastern Michigan University is located, not far from Ann Arbor. Christine is a journalism professor and media ecologist at EMU, and I have a public lecture I'm doing there tomorrow. But today, for about an hour during the first part of the drive, I stopped getting tweets on my cell phone. I don't know what happened, was Twitter down, or was it my Sprint mobile service? All I know is that I felt vaguely uneasy about the lack of incoming messages. Just like the movies, it was quiet... too quiet.
After about an hour, though, the tweets started back up, and now that I'm in my hotel room, checking my e-mail, I found a link to a YouTube video that was sent to the Media Ecology Association listserv. The video is called Twouble with Twitters, and is described simply as, "A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away." And here it is:
I think you can understand my aha! moment, here. This is why I stopped getting tweets for this morning. I guess I entered the Twitlight Zone (cue scary music... do doo do doo do doo do doo...)!
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4 comments:
Hilarious. And almost 100% accurate. I resisted for a long time because I thought it seemed like a bunch of people running by me sticking Post-It notes to my head, but once I started Tweeting, I found some interesting things happening in the fog of the mundane.
I think the saving grace for me is that my cell phone company doesn't support SMS and therefore no Twitter. I only get sucked in when I'm at my desk...which is often enough.
Ypsilanti is named after Demetrios Ypsilantis, a hero of the Greek War of Independence. That's what the hell kinda name that is, anyway...
Thanks for filling me in. I'm sure the name comes across quite differently in the Greek alphabet. And I guess I should have posed the question first on Twitter...
Thank you very much for your seal of approval on my blog post. It means a lot truly.
I hope you enjoyed your time in Ypsilanti. I know for a fact that many of my fellow attendees did. "Media ecology" is somewhat of the new buzz word around the English department.
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