The Column: A word or two about Twitter's focus on economy
Friends, do we care about Elon Musk?
Exactly as I thought.
Mature America has better things to worry about — bad knees, the price of prune juice, scam phone calls from places like Savannah and Sandy Creek and, of course, the continued ability to put on your sweatpants without assistance.
The name Elon Musk may sound like a macho brand of after shave — “earthy scent of riverbed and rainforest for the most rugged of men” — but, in fact, belongs to the wealthiest person in the world.
In case you missed it, Wealthiest Person, age 51, bought the social-
networking platform Twitter for
$44 billion — a fabulous amount that makes my 401(k) seem like the tip I hand our garbage haulers at Christmas.
He also is behind the Tesla electric automobile, a private spaceship business and a tunnel-digging firm mischievously called The Boring Co. (Little venture capitalist humor there, I guess. Aren’t the rich a riot?) Most recently he’s been talking about implants connecting the human brain to computers. My suggestion: Musk goes first.
The Twitter deal has caused all sorts of debate related to blockbuster transactions, free speech, executive privilege, heartless firings (Musk is a whiz at summary dismissals) and other mind-numbing matters apt to make one turn quickly to the sports page for hockey results.
Important issues, OK, but difficult to engage because Twitter and the act of message-sending called tweeting are no more part of my life than hang gliding or Parcheesi tournaments.
Someone of a distant generation can be excused for doubting the urgency of a communications scheme that limits commentary to 280 characters, spaces included, and tempts otherwise rational people to post remarks better directed at the snoozing family dachshund.
In writing, economy is encouraged. Less is more. Still, you can go too far.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, masterwork of efficiency, comes in at 1,469 characters (and spaces), according to my computer. That’s more than five tweets.
Just imagine the Twitterati’s response.
“Bor-ing.”
“Blah, blah, blah,”
“Dude, lose the ‘Four score and seven.’ ”
Millions worldwide use Twitter — not always the smartest choice, say experts.
“Twitter is eroding your intelligence,” a headline in The Washington Post declared. “Now there’s data to prove it.”
The newspaper cited Italian research into two groups of high school students assigned to analyze the same novel. One group used Twitter. Another stuck with classroom instruction. Guess who did better? Yup, tweetie-pies underperformed by 25% to 40%, prompting the Post to conclude Twitter “could be making its users, well, a bit witless.”
Oh, sure, this is another one of those disconnects that makes you feel like a hopeless, out-of-touch crank — someone who feared the pocket calculator would calcify our brains and make us unable to count change.
Maybe caution runs in the family.
My father wouldn’t buy a television until “they perfected it.”
This meant a childhood largely watching Milton Berle through the first-floor apartment window of the Petersons next door.
When, finally, we inherited my aunt’s 10-inch RCA housed in wooden cabinet roughly the size of a shipping crate, Dad couldn’t get enough.
“Quiet, if you don’t mind. Señor Wences is next on ‘Ed Sullivan.’ ”
So, all right, I get it. Twitter is here to stay along with all the other social media stuff that is supposed to bring us together in perfect harmony. (How’s that working out, by the way?)
Sentimentalist, I still prefer conversation, no word count imposed.
My pal Sidney called the other day.
As often is the case, Sidney talked about current reading matter — a Dorothy Sayers mystery, this time, though it might have been a poem by Emily Dickinson or the Walden essays of Henry David Thoreau, or something on obscure European history he found at the library — and then branched into current events, a wedding in New Jersey, the wisdom of his Uncle Aaron, news that signs on Rogers Avenue in Brooklyn now also bear the name of Haitian independence hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and a wistful remembrance of his last great steak at Peter Luger’s.
All of which comes in a cheery stream of consciousness that leaves me speechless, yes, but renewed.
How fortunate for all those words, I think, for the person who chooses them, the friend who so easily sends them forth.
I wonder: Is Elon Musk so lucky?
