In Praise of Snippets
It is funny to see all the angst about social networks, mobile phones and the attention economy as clear one-sided evils that are dumbing all of us down. Is this the future we want for our children!? With the reliance on mobile maps, where have our former survival skills gone? How are we supposed to work on the unified theory of gravitation while our devices distract us with videos of cats?
I, for one, get a lot from Twitter and Youtube and other channels from the “web 2.0” revolution. There are short time diversions that can be escapist and superficial, but also things that are smart or obscure, or that would have no other platform to get published or aired on, or that I would have never found anyway.
The aghast guardians of culture wanting people to go back to consuming lengthy tomes could probably learn a thing or two about capturing attentions and imaginations from these upstarts.
A few tweets:
Once Mozart had to write for a singer he disliked who moved her head up and down with the notes when she sang so he gave her an aria with a bunch of quickly alternating high and low notes so that she would bob her head like a chicken and that my friends is pettiness as art
— 🎹 sharon su 🎹 (@doodlyroses) October 14, 2022
I got two Leonard Cohen records at Amoeba & the cashier kind of caught his breath & choked a little which made me choke a little but then I also got a Billy Idol record so that lightened things up but man we're gonna be choking about Leonard Cohen for a long time huh
— jon klassen (@burstofbeaden) September 13, 2018
The perfect book display doesn't exis-
— Classical Studies Memes for Hellenistic Teens (@CSMFHT) September 15, 2022pic.twitter.com/9Uwqsk0YEU
Darse cuenta de que el kiosko antiwoke es uno de los fenómenos más patéticos de la época no implica para nada ser woke.
— Santiago Gerchunoff (@sangerchu) September 21, 2022
If you have dead wood in your organisation you either hired dead wood in the first place, or you hired live wood; then killed it. - Deming
— David Daly (@DavidDalyWL) April 24, 2016
