Recently Miley Cyrus made a headline splash by declaring that she was quitting Twitter. “I stopped living for moments and started living for people,” she said (Of course a few pics of you in your skivvies might influence your decision to get off the interwebs too). She then lost all possible credibility on the topic by making a hideous rap song and posting it on YouTube.
But let’s not forget that Miley is seventeen years old (I kind of choked on my coffee when I realized she was born my freshman year of high school). So, she’s allowed to make a fool of herself more often than not. That’s what teenagers do – fortunately, and unfortunately for Miley, most teenagers don’t have their lives in the limelight a majority of time. But teenagers also have little moments of wisdom that we’d be wise to heed, and I think Miley might be on to something here. When she says she’s living for people, she of course meant her followers.
I understand where she’s coming from. I’ve found myself more concerned about providing content for others than enjoying life and its moments. I’ve been sucked in to the Real-Time Web, where every moment is an opportunity to be catalogued and disseminated to a waiting audience (kind of like right now).
I came across an excellent article by Paul Carr on this concept of the Real-Time Web. We’d all be wise to ponder the implications of Carr’s words. Here’s a quote I found especially poignant:
“And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.”
You can read the whole article here.
[Picture courtesy of Come Back on The Radar]
Well…since Miley quite Twitter I don’t see much use of it for me anymore.
Wait. You’re on Twitter!?
[...] no Pascal, but I’ve mused on this in a more low-brow form here while reflecting on this quote from Paul [...]