technical images and linear text

Twitter is such a mysterious phenomenon.

I mean, here is a site which shamelessly caters to contemporary individuals’ love for the feeling of having a group of friends, without any of the pesky responsibilities commonly associated with having such a group. High-frequency, low-commitment interaction: the ideal type of postmodern sociability, if such a notion is even coherent.

It’s pretty clear though that what has animated the bizarre public phenomenon called Twitter is the fact that famous people use it (even if they’re not always really them). I mean, really, nobody cares about the masses – without idiots like these, do you really think that we would be in the weird situation of having more words said about this damn site in the mainstream media than it’s really possible to say on the medium itself?

Yet in spite of my tone I do think that this opens up some wond’rous possibilities. I have thus far resisted the temptation to join up myself – given my penchant for undue verbosity, and my loathing of the ‘LOLZ 4 U’ grammatical paradigm, it doesn’t seem like it’s for me – but there is nevertheless all kinds of fun stuff you can come across by voyaging through the site. Such as for instance the Twitter feeds of certain well-known pornographic actresses, which occupied a good hour of my morning. The particularly fun part is that you realize from these sites that these are not cyborg Amazons from Mars, but relatively ordinary girls who – if, like me, you’re a 25 year old male - are three-to-five years younger than you are, who take pictures of themselves in the mirrors of their messy rooms wearing oversized clothing, and who in fact appear to spend a silly amount of time responding to the comments of their fans.  They just happen to get plowed in various orifices for public display, and maybe sometimes they suck eighteen dicks in a row, and probably they do more drugs than you do, but in other respects they are quite normal.

The coolest part of all this though are the weird interactions that you can track through Twitter. Obviously on these feeds there is a considerable amount of social-network back-and-forth between porn actresses, and news about public appearances, and communication with obvious, obsessive ‘fans,’ but it’s the little gems like this that make Twitter-stalking celebrities conducting this kind of ethnographic study worthwhile: ‘axiomvv’ is a Christian, football-obsessed, community college student, who between posting the results of Stanford games and looking to Rick Warren for affirmation, is in regular communication via Twits with several porn stars. Who would have thought that A) someone is online telling Faye Reagan and Sasha Grey directly that ‘God has a plan’ for them, and that B) such actresses would warmly engage with such a correspondent on a regular basis?

I could go on for quite a while about this joyous serendipity, but no doubt that would start to seem creepy. In any case, I guess this just goes to show that, whatever one’s expectations or generalizations about how people use social media might be, they grossly underestimate the kinds of wacky and unpredictable shit that are made possible by every new mode of communication.