My whole life is online. Pictures of me. My obsessions and disasters. It hasn’t happened overnight. Over the past 17 years I have emerged piecemeal online. Beginning with intimate stories published when I was in high school, my life online began as a genuflection to a medium I was in awe of and erratically evolved into what it is today: home.

Just last week a friend bemoaned the unfortunate condition of me living my life online. The concern was that I was afforded no privacy about various details of my life. Between my blog, Twitter and the butterfly effect as my life is linked and retweeted, I could not dispute the facts of his concern.

But my so-called unfortunate condition only appears unfortunate because I am that rarefied elite known as the vanguard. According to Neilsen’s Twitter had a 1382% growth rate in February 2009. According to me, the way I live my life online is merely trendsetting and not exactly unfortunate. Each passing month a new army of people are broadening their contexts for communication and evolving too by tweeting their ideas, photos and pithy commentary. Soon, sadly, I will be nothing more than another average person with only this blog to evidence my past vanguardism. All I will be left with are my fantastic cutting-edge blouses. (more…)

Twitter has hit the tipping point, and may now even threaten Google. The search function possibilities

WARNING: This blog post is so long you won’t be able to read it all in under 96 seconds!

The 140 character communication technology Twitter has hit the tipping point. It has real-time search functions that might even threaten Google.

I blog for The Walrus. A publication committed to long-form journalism. Blogs should ideally be readable in 96 seconds or less, which is the average length of time your eyes will rest upon my page. Uh-oh. Even worse, I blog about Twitter and the bleeding edges of electronic communication technologies. The viability of which can be boiled down to one thing: being short.

Lucky for me, length isn’t what it used to be. (more…)

The economy is in shambles Warren Buffet says so. If you are a success you are doomed.

But there is no need to panic! Failure is totally popular.

Go ahead. Watch the Today Show, Good Morning America or any morning program. You will learn how to eat cheaply in the failing economy by eating frozen vegetables. Or how to decorate with wrapping papers to make your home seasonally appropriate while unemployed. Every story, from the Oscars to Obama’s First 100 Days is run through the rubric of economic collapse. It’s replaced the weather as topical for the lady I just rode the elevator with. In between Skittle chatter, Twitter’s chemosensitive hairs are aquiver with the triumphant popularity of economic failure. Slowly but surely the economic failure is becoming entertainment gold. Depression Chic has infiltrated everything from fashion to Ebay. (more…)

MYRTLE BEACH, SC—I met him yesterday at 1 pm at Plantation Pancake House near Myrtle Beach. I got there early and a strawberry blonde Russian woman ordered me to sit.  Faded plastic flowers in pink and purple pastels infect every level surface. The carpet was right out of the Glitter Gulch. My leather jacket squeaked as I slid into a mauve sunlit booth.

He was younger perhaps and probably quite a bit taller. But my date was a dead ringer for David Lynch. Hair. Eyes. That’s why I agreed to it. Oh, and also because he had a boring job and an education at a liberal arts college. I wanted to learn about the history of Myrtle Beach. Not Nascar. I was saving that for my cousin’s visit.

Pleased, he drawled, to meet you. He held out a giant hand. My iphone began ringing:

I like to kill deer I like to kill deer  I like to kill deer

It is a David Lynch ringtone that I’m quite fond of. I gripped my iphone and shrugged. It was someone I didn’t want to talk to. So I let it keep, uh, kill-deer-ringing.

Plantation Pancakes serves lunch. Somehow it also closes at 2pm. So the staff shut off the lights and began vacuuming around us as soon as we sat down. We were the only customers amidst the now shadowy plastic foliage.

I stared at this David Lynch. He stared back. A tiny waitress appeared and yelled up to me. (more…)

COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG, VA—Have you ever gone back in time?

This weekend I went back to 1776. I thought if I went back far enough in time I could fix all the things I wish had happened differently. Then, ideally, when I came back to the future I’d become the successful McFly instead of the loser McFly I am now.

When I got to Colonial Williamsburg, though, it wasn’t the past I expected and needed it to be. Instead of revolutionary spirit, the colonialists were merely distracted by their economic realities. Undaunted, I found a private corner of the Public Gaol and scribbled my name, phone number and a warning message for my future self:

Global Depression 2008! Avoid love! (more…)

I haven’t had any death threats causing me to quit the social web. Nor have I been able to resist following brand new celebrity twitterers Demi Moore and Soleil Moon Frye. But that isn’t the worst news of the week: No matter what I do, I cannot get over being personally attacked by Twitter late last year.

You see, they took away my free SMS Twitter updates. They made me into a second-class Twitter citizen. I was ousted from the lifestream and became a treader of murky Twitter backwash instead.

But I have foiled you now Twitter! (more…)

So-called citizen journalists broke The Miracle on the Hudson aka Canadian Geese: Terror In The Skies! on Twitter. A Floridian on one of the tour boats posted the first picture of the rescue. It was a crappy picture and he was more excited about being able to be a journalist on his iphone than communicating important details. To quote jkrums: “Crazy.”

I am not inured to the exuberance epidemic sweeping popular culture about social media. This week Hoda and Kathy Lee got on Facebook and are beside themselves about it. If you pitch investors and drop the Twitter-bomb the economic depression we’re in get’s blown to bits and money rains down. But does socializing media and creating a different way to communicate that is more immediate make all of us in the world into citizen journalists?

Calling twitterers journalists is the usual boogeyman for paid journalists. Understandable because as our print news goes out of print and careers are lost the final hurrah of old-fashioned journalists will be bloody and moaning. But I’ll call anyone a journalist. Even my dog. (more…)

Yes. That’s right. I’m saying it’s over. My love affair with the socialnets might have finally ended.

As CNN and phishing scams have piled on, the gloss has come off Twitter for me. Cloud computing is just another boring concentration of power. And the (white, male, monied) tech news ratface race is blisteringly tedious. It’s not that I am going to be quitting Twitter or the cloud: I’m writing this post in the cloud on Google Docs. But it’s all completely integrated into my life now. Like breathing. Tools that are available just aren’t really that sexy anymore. (more…)