“Science-fiction writers can’t write about popular culture, even high culture, without trotting out their own self-importance… If you’d look at most science-fiction practitioners, they basically come across like a Nashville hat act. They’re hicks.” – Bruce Sterling
No Twitter for the Rich
Siren by Marc Quinn (Kate Moss)
First, lets get something out of the way, for once and for all: if you work in media and you still don’t get Twitter (today, three years after you should have) you should probably just quit or wait until you are eventually fired. Really, if you are pitching a “who cares what you had for lunch” article to your editor, you are no different than a major car manufacturer who doesn’t understand what the fuss over fuel-efficient vehicles is about.
But Virginia Heffernan, whose NYT The Medium columns lately have been, uhhh, questionable, has an interesting take on the old MSM “twitter is narcissism blah, blah…” She mentions Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW on how the new sign of poverty is, “dependence on ‘connections’ like the Internet, Skype and texting… Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Rex when I was in New York. What celebrities won’t join Twitter? I said Angelina Jolie, but he pointed out she’d probably hire someone to post UN Press Releases. A non-Twitter-ing celebrity would be someone like Catherine Deneuve, or less obviously Naomi Watts. Someone who is essentially content with their station on the Hollywood totem pole.
Some will say, as @biz explained on The Colbert Report, they Twitter to create and control their own PR –a wrecking ball to gossip glossies. But all the celebrities on Twitter are in some ways striving for something. Just browse CelebrityTweet (yes, it exists.) Witness the enormous explosion among hasbeens like Liam Gallagher, Donny Wahlberg, Soleil Moon Frye, and Danny Masterson.
If the celeb-twitterer is someone who might not seem to be the sort to bother with this kind of thing (eg @bjork) the account is inevitably run by someone else as a PR station. (The two clear exceptions being @DAVID_LYNCH and @yokoono, which are part art project, part PR.) Maybe every celebrity will eventually have a Twitter account. But only the striving will be the ones engaging its social aspects.
If you are going to SXSW this year (and I, unfortunately, will not) don’t miss the Monday night event “Plutopia” with Bruce Sterling and Natasha Vita-More, founder and director of the Transhumanist Arts and Culture World Center, and president of the Extropy Institute. The event “uses music, art and performance to encourage attendees to imagine an infinite number of possible future utopias.”
Oh, to be in Barcelona with the beautiful people, tiny alleys, tapas, Zara outlets, Palau de la Musica, Gaudis, and the new JG Ballard exhibit. Ballardian has a great review of “Autopsy of the New Millennium” –”The first bit of irony comes quickly when you discover this building was first constructed as a hospital.” The show also includes Ballard-influenced art by Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord, and others. Nice quote from Bruce Sterling in the program: “Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities–how it might feel, what it might mean. A bizarre contemporary event like the paparazzi car-crash death of Princess Diana is perfectly Ballardian. No flow chart, no equation, no profit projection could ever have predicted that, but if you’ve read Ballard, you swiftly recognize the smell of it. I daresay that’s the best the SF genre will ever do–and no more should ever be asked of it.”
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