Twit for Tat
This morning I sat down for a necessary, routine red cup of coffee at Starbucks, when a rather loud splash caused me to look up from the Twitter feed on my phone. Looking around the coffee shop, I was violently cognizant of the fact that I was surrounded by people who looked and behaved in the same way I did — with their heads curled down and hands poised above blatantly bright mobile phones. I watched them, their fingers like bird beaks, mindlessly twittering and pecking at the glass screen, yearning for the perfect collocation of words that would buy them an appreciable amount of approval, of likes, from their followers. It occurred to me that I knew this because these — however much I did not want them to be — had been my own thoughts before I had looked up.
We are a generation plagued by social media. Writing has, regrettably, become a corrupt art form, our appetite for it spoiled by the constraints of school and the quality of it spoiled by the constraints of the mere 140 characters that social media allots us. We have reduced ourselves to writing only what will please others. We write — if not in Size 12 Times New Roman to satisfy criteria imposed on us by schoolteachers — to vie for attention. Seldom do we find well-penned aesthetic or polemical pieces written for one’s own enjoyment; instead we have been afflicted by a desire to broadcast our everyday trivia online as a means of advancing our popularity.
Yet even trivia has taken on a new dimension: where in earlier days our fingers flipped thick paper tomes filled with endearingly elaborate passages, they now tap tiny glass screens containing scraps of completely useless information. We are more inclined to tweet and share a photo of a name brand red cup — showcasing our status and willfully falling prey to society’s materialistic tendencies — than anything of actual import, i.e., the genuine plights of people in developing countries.
Using social media has led us to successfully morph writing into an unrecognizable perversion of itself. We are attracted to its convenience, which prompts us to craft more meaningless posts, and in doing so we destroy the former sophistication of the English language. We have effectively lodged ourselves in an insidious inhibitory loop. And like peacocks, we preen ourselves constantly in search of followers and mates, all the while unaware of the eyespots on our tails that so closely resemble the disapproving eyes of our literary predecessors.
Every day, we attempt to pass off this red cup of bitter bean juice as palatable because others seem to enjoy it. In reality, it only marginally staves off our thirst, leaving us parched and in want of a second cup of stronger coffee within a matter of hours. Certainly, we would be better off without coffee altogether, but we realize this only after we have inadvertently developed a dependence on it. Likewise, this echoes how we allow ourselves to become addicted to social media — simply because it has become the norm.
I had finished my coffee by the time I’d thoroughly contemplated this. As I got up to order a refill, swirling the dregs around my cup, I paused — the thick paper cup sleeve read: CAUTION.
