Civil Society (wordle)

Nothing to Twitter About

Earlier today I was cruising my favourite online paper, that leftist British stalwart, The Guardian. When I think of The Guardian I imagine a London pub filled brimming with aging intelligensia journalists, attired in tweed, complaining about Gordon Brown and reminiscing about the days before Thatcher (for whom not coincidentally this blog is named in tribute). It's a lovely, nostalgic image to imagine the place your news orginates and this consequently keeps me reading The Guardian.

All imaginings aside, this Guardian article caught my eye. The article is about Twitter, the microblogging site with which the faddish media are so infatuated. "Twitter not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15 year old expert," the headline declared.

Well, I could have told you that. Matthew Robson, the investment bank's 15 year old intern (can you say well connected? working at MS at 15!), shocked top analysts when he boldly declared what anyone under the age of 25 could have easily told you: Twitter is useless.

Shortly after reading the article, I learned that 60% of those who sign up for Twitter don't use the service after the first month. So while Twitter may have enormous growth rates this quarter, don't expect them to translate into real returns or high rates of user retention.

The largest problem with the service is the 140 character limit which makes it impossible to "tweet" anything intelligible. Even in this age of Adderall and sound bites, our attentions spans have not become quite so short as to remain attentive only to six words of information at a time (see public's infatuation with eloquency in the rise of Barack Obama).

The second problem is that due to the character limit "tweets" (how I hate that word!) are forced to become of only the most inane subject matter. Miley Cyrus recently made blogging headlines when she posted she was "eatin' an apple." The vast majority of human existence simply is not interesting enough to merit a description to be shared with your closest 300 followers to Twitter's ubiquitous question --"What are you doing?"

At an exclusive gathering in the ski resort town of Sun Valley, Utah earlier this week, media moguls like News Corp's Rupert Murdoch (though shouldn't he be dealing with the tabloid scandal back home??) quietly announced their concern about the difficulty in monetarizing a service like Twitter.

See this article from the Financial Times


So while all that twittering during the Iranian elections was very cool and 21st century, don't expect anyone whose other forms of communications are not banned by a repressive government to actually use the service. The fifteen year old got this one right: there's nothing to twitter about.

James Nachtwey on anti-war photography

Nachtwey's photographs hybrid the terror of war with a certain stylized beauty. In this TED talk, he discusses his experience. Someone needs to write his biography!

No Escape, Not Even to Kyoto

I've loved travel writer Pico Iyer since I first read "Global Soul" a few years ago. This article from The Walrus perfectly captures the restless, unsatisfied mind.

There’s no escaping anything in life. Fly all the way to Tahiti or the Himalayas, and what you’ll find — as the Hollywood clichés often remind us — is that person who’s always longing to escape. At peace for a while, but only in the way of someone who has taken a painkiller for the growing cancer in his stomach. Or run out of a relationship, and where are you but in a state in which you long to run into another relationship from which to run out of again? The only way we change our circumstances (and, yes, I know this is the message of every Hollywood romantic comedy, too) is by living inside them and changing our minds, deepening and refining the very notion of escape until, perhaps, it explodes.

When I was in my twenties, I thought I had everything I could want in life: a fun job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, a chance to take my holidays in Burma and El Salvador and Tibet, free time over the weekends to write from the heart for the more radical magazines (the Village Voice, the Nation) I’d grown up on. No cares in the world and an apartment that (officially, at least) was on Park Avenue. Even my landlady’s name, as if sent from screenwriter’s heaven, was Aida Descartes. Melody chiming with philosophy.

And so I left. Not because I wasn’t comfortable, fulfilled, and happy, but precisely because I was. And so, I thought, I might easily drift along this sweetly flowing stream until I hit retirement age, and then wake up and wonder where my life had gone. At some level, even in my belated adolescence, I realized that what truly sustained and fulfilled me was new challenges, unsettledness, and a chance to throw over my puny ideas of myself and the world.

So I took myself off to a small temple on the back streets of Kyoto and lived in a bare tatami room without toilet or bed or private telephone. And I found that what I’d taken there was — a surprise to no one but myself — a restless journalist from midtown Manhattan. I was thinking about East and West, I was measuring myself by how much (or in this case how little) I had in my room, I was still sending essays to Time, though now from a pay phone next to a temple after midnight. I’d traded in one life for a better, truer, deeper one, but since I still thought circumstances mattered, that was like trading in a ‘93 Honda for a ‘94.

Now I live not far from that temple in a two-room apartment in suburban Japan, with no bicycle, car, TV I can understand, or websites. I share the tiny space with the same woman I met on my third week in Japan, twenty-one years ago, and I still send my pontifications off to New York, though now by slightly updated means. And yet I’m not escaping anything, I hope, because I’m not in search of anything. In my twenties, I thought Kyoto would offer me silence, space, solitude for reflection, all the things I couldn’t get in my fast-paced job. I was right, and yet none of those qualities inhere in a place or situation, only in our relation to them.

Now I realize Kyoto brings me broken washing machines, traffic at midnight, and calls every evening from telemarketers — nothing so different from Park Avenue at all. But I’ve outgrown (I hope) any sense that I need to escape anything other than my lame ideas. Young, I thought Manhattan was so great, I had to check out the opposite alternatives; now, having checked them out, I see that they’re just more beautiful and appealing ways of formulating the same question — or staging the same evasion. The only kind of escape I treasure is the one that takes you deeper and more truly into something real.

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.07-travel-to-kyoto-pico-iyer/

Franglais and Boreal on the Taxpayer's Dime

As a university student in the ‘70s, my Anglophone uncle ran away to Quebec for the summer and never came back. He participated in a language immersion program in Trois Pistoles, fell in love with the province (nation?), and to this day resides in Quebec City. Thirty years later, I decided to follow in his footsteps – at least for the summer.

Having lived in the world's second largest French speaking city (that would be Montreal) for the past nine months with no functional ability to communicate in French, I decided the time was ripe to improve. I settled on the Explore program, five weeks of language instruction and for high school and university students in various French speaking areas across the country, fully covered by federal tax dollars. Thanks, Daddy.

A bit of history: the program was started in the late '60s under the auspices of that most Obama-like of Canadian leaders (not Iggy). Trudeau's studied opposition to Quebecois nationalism combined with a desire to improve Canadians bilingualism led to the creation of the Explore program in ‘67.

In the midst of a global recession, trying to find a decent summer job for a first year university student (in arts, no less!) with little in the way of work experience save for a choice selection of cushy extra-curriculars promised to be a feat of iliadic proportions. When in doubt why not fall back on the welfare state? We do pay for it after all. And what could be better procrastination than five weeks of cheap Quebecois beer and Franglais on the taxpayer's dime?

Thus, I decided to demonstrate a commitment to my country and to my bilingualism (read: Franglais) and pack up for five weeks in Trois Pistoles, Quebec, population about 3 000. In the summer.

For a city dwelling, Anglophile, Westmount wannabe such as myself, Trois Pistoles' single rue principale was a shock. I missed hot dog vendors, and smog, and noise. Oh how I missed noise! After watching an ambulance slowly amble by with no need for a siren due to the dearth of traffic, I was sorely tempted to hop on the next (albeit seven hour) train ride back to civilization.

But in spite of being bored out of my mind, the town is quaint, unfamiliar, and new. Living as I do in Montreal, sheltered in my English student bubble, rarely venturing east of St Denis, much less Papineau, it is easy to forget that Quebec is any different than the rest of the country. One big North American city looks much like the next. Baltimore, Philadelphia, Montreal - it's easy to forget where you are. In Trois Pistoles, Quebec's cultural difference is for the first time palatable.

The majority of the town doesn’t speak English. Food ranges from baguette with smelly Basque camabert and yellow, tomato-like cherises de terre to greasy, brown sauce smothered poutine at the local “Cantine d’Amour.” Trois Pistoles holds claim to the continent's “pelot Basque” court, a raquet sport obscure in North America but popular in France. No reassuring Canadian flag flies outside of the elementary school.

Over dinner a few nights ago, a girl I am living with asked our host family, bravely and bluntly, "Est-ce que vous vous appellez un Quebecois ou un Canadien?” Do you call yourself Quebecois or Canadian? It was the first time the subject had been openly breached. Funny that here we are on a program designed to foster dialogue between the two nations of our country and yet everyone is too terrified or polite to actually discuss it. The elephant in the room. How typically Canadian!

The reply was also decidedly Canadian, ironic but diplomatic. “Alors, nos passports dissent Canadien donc…” Well, our passports say Canadian so… But of course they were kidding. “Canadien, bien sur,” they reassured us. The separatist movement is over, Quebec satisfied with its limited autonomy and benefits within Canada.

Certainly, the sixty-something lady I’m living with has a framed photo of Rene Levesque in her living room, but these days most young Quebecers don't appear to care one way or another. In the high school where we take language classes, English influence is clearly apparent. “Nous devons chill ce weekend!” “M’envoyez un text!” Far from what the FLQ wanted.

Fifteen years after the referendum, when “oui” and “non” signs pitted neighbor against neighbor, the question of Quebec separatism appears to have died of apathy. After five weeks bored in Trois Pistoles, however, my knowledge of Quebecois slang has markedly improved. Without the separatist movement, that never would have been possible.