Wednesday 25 March 2009

Memo to Twitterers: Socrates Has Some Advice for You

The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates famously said. I’ve always thought that was taking navel-gazing a bit far, but I’m ready to state a corollary: the unexamined life is not worth writing about.

Somehow I find myself being “friends” with a number of people who can’t stop posting what they’re doing on FaceBook. Eating breakfast, putting out the trash, listing their five favourite movies: they seem to have unlimited time to tell everyone their most inconsequential thoughts or actions.

And people tell me Twitter is even worse.

When we were children we used to snicker when someone was said to have diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain. What is this new phenomenon? Hyperactivity of the fingers? Paralysis of the mind? Far better to take the long view, and think before communicating...anything.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Found your blog by surprise. Yeah I remember better days. Most of my friends are sloths that hang on trees that have built in mp3 and movie players with telephone capabilities with SMS messaging and can do just about anything with an app from the zapp store. I used to play a lot of sports but I moved to another city. Most of the friends here don't care to go out for a walk or something so effortless that will raise their heart rate a bit. It's just a litte more difficult than it was before to go play basketball alone rather than with a group of people.

take care,




j

Mary Soderstrom said...

Nice comment for Earth Day! Actually hanging around folks who do Earth Day things might be a way of connecting with people who like sports, outdoors, actual talking and stuff like that.

Shooting baskets by yourself just isn't as much fun!

Keep the faith.

M