What might E.B. White think of Twitter?
I owe E.B. White's spirit an apology for doubting his enduring relevance.
Shirley assured me this was a great book, but quite honestly, I was a little dubious. When readers picked it for our February read, I groaned inwardly (please accept my mea culpa for doubting you) and braced myself for a pleasant anachronistic voyage. Sure, the foreword and blurbs promised White's words held lasting resonance, but face it: Life's not the same as it was in the late 1930s on a rural Maine farm.
Luckily, I started the book chronologically, with "Removal," the first piece, in which White talks about his decision to "simplify" by leaving New York, his struggle to rid himself of excess possessions and the way the world is changing.
"Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between the things that are and the things that seem to be," he writes as he ponders the rise of radio and the prospect of television's spread.
"Together with the tabs, the mags and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images -- distant and concocted."
It instantly made me think of Twitter, and the Internet in general.
Like many people in my age group, I'm living a good chunk of my life online -- getting my news there, connecting with friends there, and in the case of Twitter, finding out information and talking to folks that I might not have ever known to seek out.
Mostly, it feels good, but sometimes, it feels like a tidal surge of information -- too much to digest in what time I have. I forget where I read this (another hazard of over-info-consumption), but someone compared Twitter to trying to drink from a firehose. Sometimes it's like quicksand -- and at times, I've had to remind myself to step away from the computer and live. So White's words struck a chord.
White saw a dark side to the spread of radio and television and how it changed people's view of themselves and their world: "When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad."
I don't know that I agree with him -- I see some of his point, but I think he was disregarding the benefits that expanded knowledge, information and connections can bring. I'm looking forward to reading more and seeing if, and how, he revisits this topic.
But I do know this: I'm convinced enough of his relevance to wish he were around to argue about it -- or maybe even get a debate going on Twitter.
Posted at 04:21 PM
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I often caution myself to not get to caught up in the vast amount of tragedy we are exposed to in the media these days. It either makes me unable to breath or less sensitive than I'd like to be. Especially as I am a parent I see so many worrying about things that are very unlikely to happen but we see sensationalized so much they become impossible to ignore. The financial crisis we are living through right now could also be a product of, driven by, or at least heightened by the media frenzy.
I haven't used Twitter as long as you have so I may not have seen the evolution of a sad story in an overwhelming way, yet. But I have noticed something intriguing and I'd be curious to see what you think. Twitter news stories get passed around via retweets, remarked on and passed around more. In rapid time people become aware of news event faster than anything I've ever seen and then... Some twitterer gets that urge we all get sitting and reading the paper or watching TV... the wish that we could do something, help out in some way, the same thing that mostly drifts away with daily concerns. But it doesn't drift away on Twitter.
Someone may tweet a wish to help and someone will agree and then someone figures out a way to do just that and a social action takes shape. I know this doesn't happen with every issue or sad story but Twitter really is such a dynamic tool that perhaps it is not more of what E. B. White was reacting to, perhaps it is the antidote.
Posted by
GennyferFebruary 9, 2009 06:17 PM
I often caution myself to not get to caught up in the vast amount of tragedy we are exposed to in the media these days. It either makes me unable to breath or less sensitive than I'd like to be. Especially as I am a parent I see so many worrying about things that are very unlikely to happen but we see sensationalized so much they become impossible to ignore. The financial crisis we are living through right now could also be a product of, driven by, or at least heightened by the media frenzy.
I haven't used Twitter as long as you have so I may not have seen the evolution of a sad story in an overwhelming way, yet. But I have noticed something intriguing and I'd be curious to see what you think. Twitter news stories get passed around via retweets, remarked on and passed around more. In rapid time people become aware of news event faster than anything I've ever seen and then... Some twitterer gets that urge we all get sitting and reading the paper or watching TV... the wish that we could do something, help out in some way, the same thing that mostly drifts away with daily concerns. But it doesn't drift away on Twitter.
Someone may tweet a wish to help and someone will agree and then someone figures out a way to do just that and a social action takes shape. I know this doesn't happen with every issue or sad story but Twitter really is such a dynamic tool that perhaps it is not more of what E. B. White was reacting to, perhaps it is the antidote.
Posted by
GennyferFebruary 9, 2009 06:25 PM
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