saturday mornings are for thinking

On twitter, and Republicans

There's a piece in Slate, Do I really have to join Twitter?, that reminded me of a conversation I had with ivyblossom, on Twitter, about Twitter. Because yeah, after all that, I got on and now I'm watching it with interest, even if I don't have piles of tweets per day.

What I found—which is really what I found with LJ, with Facebook, with any other site I actually use—is that people telling you "things you can do" on a new site is not helpful. You think, "but I don't want to do those things." You might not want to "microblog" in any way that gets talked about in any of those "why you should join twitter" guides. I know I don't. I follow friends, not celebs; I have three celebs that I'm following right now: Ryan (of course), Joel McHale and MIB. I don't really want to follow more celebs, because as a rule I don't care about celebs in that way. I also don't make many updates about what I'm actually doing, because most of what I'm actually doing is quite dull. Grading, writing lectures, writing some fic, watching House of Eliott—yawn! And if I have more to say about those things, like how I'm reacting to a TV show, my LJ is better for those kinds of thoughts, which tend to be deeper.

I picked up Twitter back in September, put it down again, then picked it up again in November and have been going fairly steadily ever since. What Twitter has evolved into for me is (1) asynchronous chatting—a LOT of my tweets are replies to others; (2) observations of life in NYC, particularly my neighborhood. Yesterday a passion procession went by my window, singing in French. That's the sort of thing I twitter about. I post the occasional link. (I like Facebook a little better for that, and I have a very different audience on Facebook, so sometimes I'll double post a link.)

So I'd say the best recommendation for people wondering about a new social networking/blogging/whateverthehell site is, futz with it, come back to it, see what works for you, make it your own. I'm sure fandom wasn't the killer app for LJ, either.


I'm very interested in watching the Republicans flail around trying to work out who they are as a party. I'm not sure about all these pronouncements of their being dead; they're certainly more alive than the Whigs were in 1824, and they managed to limp along for another few decades. But seeing the core get more and more doctrinaire while many pundits advise that if the party doesn't reach out they'll be over demographically in a few decades anyway is sort of breathtaking, as is the bizarre debate Lawrence O'Donnell and Patrick Buchanan had about whether Notre Dame should have invited Obama to come speak, which boiled down to:

Buchanan: Obama is pro-abortion, and the Church is against abortion! They should not have invited him to speak at Notre Dame!
O'Donnell: Bush is pro-death penalty and the Church is against the death penalty for the same moral reasons, and he spoke there with no controversy.
Buchanan: But abortion kills innocent babies and the death penalty kills the guilty!
O'Donnell: But the Church doesn't care about innocent and guilty; it cares about life.
Buchanan: But abortion is wrong!
O'Donnell: Also Bush signed orders of execution—he was personally involved in the process of capital punishment. Obama isn't an abortionist.
Buchanan: But innocent children! Murderers, who cares about them?
O'Donnell: Well, Pope John Paul II personally pleaded with President Bush to end the death penalty in the United States, so I'd say he cared.
Buchanan: But hypocrisy!
O'Donnell: I'd say that the Church's idea of social justice has more in common with Obama's social programs. And also, you are the hypocrite, because the reasoning against the death penalty is the same as the reasoning against abortion!
Buchanan: *flails*
O'Donnell: My work is done.

You can see their MSNBC segment for yourself at Talking Points Memo.