Twitter turned 10 years old on Monday.
Twitter, a decade old. Crazy, right?
It's unbelievable. And it's not.
There are a lot of us who believed 2016 would be the time described to us by "The Jetsons" or "Back to the Future."
Jay GreesonThis was going to be a time of flying cars and teleportation. This was going to be the age of nuclear fusion in our kitchen. Heck, Prince - or whatever his name is now - talked about partying like it was 1999, and that new century party is now so dated, Izod shirts are making fun of it.
But Twitter, at the tender age of 10, is more futuristic than we give it credit.
Twitter is a handheld global news wire. It is breaking news at the blink of an eye in 140 characters. Twitter has changed more about our communication than anything since the cellphone.
Don't doubt. Twitter is a news wire and a tiny chatroom and an emoji birthing station that has directly or indirectly contributed to at least a couple of the last 10 "words of the year," according to Websters, including last year's pick which was an emoji. (An emoji, of course, is a social media icon that serves as a universal image to save words, which is another way to limit interaction and chatting.)
It's a social media device that brings media to the masses and allows the masses to contribute to media.
And we are paralyzed and worse off for it.
Twitter is the reason for "coach-speak" and a main driver of the vitriol directed at every non-conformist idea that surfaces.
Twitter offers quick snapshots into a discussion that begs for answers that are more insightful - and certainly way more layered - than anything that can be character-limited.
Think of a serious discussion that you can get into roughly 30 or so words. That's Twitter. It's great as an entertainment device, but rotten as a device of discourse.
I detest the overly politically correct culture state of our country.
It's a place where everyone is up in arms about the buffoonery of Donald Trump, and yes, there's a lot of buffoonery there to be up in arms about.
But that makes for way better Twitter rants and outrage than the discourse that was once the bedrock of democracy.
This is not Twitter's fault. This is our fault. We are distracted by jazz hands. We will text people we are in the same room with. We are social media savvy to the point that we are no longer social.
And it has skewed our decision making.
We are angry because you can only have jokes or arguments in 140 characters. There is little wisdom in 140 characters, especially since Mark Twain died.
We are looking for immediate feedback and acceptance, which Twitter instantly supplies. And know that I am a willing participant. I have more than 4,600 tweets, which sounds like I'm some sort of sado-masochistic bird watcher.
But the river of quick responses with few words is the widespread reach of the sound-bite culture. It has consumed us all and has led us to a place where Donald Trump has turned a cool hat - "Make America Great Again" is fewer than 40 characters, which leaves at least another sentence or so of context - into a path toward a presidential run.
Sure email changed the way we worked and connected, and it's the hard-drive.
But Twitter - rightly and mostly wrongly - has changed how we have communicated.
So happy birthday Twitter, and thanks for showing us that global communication can happen from the palm of our hand while we are waiting for a table at Champy's.
Still, a flying car would have been way cooler.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com. His "Right to the Point" column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays on A2.