You know what chaps my ass? Technology-obsessed people. It was bad enough a few years ago when people were on rapid-fire text mode everywhere you went. You'd be out at a club and a look around the room would show you dozens of people texting away to people who weren't there with them.
Facebook and Twitter have made things worse. Now it's not even communicating directly with people. It's about getting live shots of Mr. Random or Some Creeper lurking around you and your friends at the club, and getting them on Facebook or Twitter ASAP. Then it's back to rapid-fire text mode, as you and your friends trade OMG's and LOL's over the situation. What's happened to going out and you know, interacting with people? Paying attention to what's happening in front of you, that sort of stuff.
I'd love to see how many times the following sentence has been written:
I hate to imagine what it would be like to be Chad Ochocinco's teammate right now.
The Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver recently said that he planned on tweeting from the endzone after one of his touchdowns. The NFL stepped in and kiboshed the idea. Ochocinco announced on his UStream feed that he's found an elaborate way around the new no-tweeting rule. Via Mashable:
Ochocinco says he’ll soon launch a contest, in which he’ll select one of his followers each week, fly them to the Bengals game, and work out hand signals so he can have them update his Twitter (
) account while he’s on the field. The result will be Ochocinco tweets during the game that don’t technically violate the NFL’s policy of no cell phones during competition. In any job, you need your co-workers' attention and assistance along the way. If the guy next to you wasn't responding to your emails all morning, and you looked over to see he's been blessing the world with his 140 characters of wisdom every 10 minutes sine 9 a.m., you'd be annoyed. Imagine huddling up at the line of scrimmage, watching your quarterback call the play and wondering if your wide receiver was listening or thinking about which hand signals he was going to throw to someone in the crowd if he gets the ball.
Some people might say this is a groundbreaking way for an athlete to interact with their fans. But at some point: with a club full of people in front of you, or with tens of thousands of people with their their eyes fixed on your team's next play, there should be enough stimulus in front of you to keep you focused on what's in front of you. Is this how ADD we've become? This is how important our inner dialogues have become to us, that we have to berate strangers with them? For the benefits that social media bring, the negatives seem to pound me overtop of the head like I'm a giant wackamole of reason in a sea of Twitter insanity.
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