Right, I have gone and started twittering. I was all in an alcohol fuelled frenzy last night and when a friend of mine directed me to Twitter, and I became rabid with a thirst for a surplus of connectivity. Or something which doesn’t sound quite so Barbra Cartland-meets-PC User magazine.

Twittering or micro-blogging, in case you haven’t already discovered it, is simply a way of letting other people (your ominously named ‘followers’) know what you are doing. In other words it is like Facebook minus everything except the status updates. My twitter page is here: http://twitter.com/toxrowlang
I have also replaced this Blog’s sidebar subscriber widget with a Twitter feed. The subscriber plugin never worked properly, and I have spent enough precious time in the excruciatingly fruitless task of trying to fix it.

I am slightly concerned, however. Surely this Twitter lark opens one up to a new dimension of ego-centrism? I have half formed excuses in my head such as ‘I shall try and be innovative, interesting, informative, and wonderfully beneficial’. But I am sure that I shall doubtlessly fall back on obscenity and knob-gags. And what better platform for it (bar Blackpool pier)?

Warhol was wrong. In the future, humans are not going to have fifteen minutes of fame. They are going to be permanently famous at the centre of their own little virtual world. The architecture for it is being thrown up around us as we browse. Will we all end up like Quaid in the film Total Recall? Will we all become the exultant heroes of our exceptionally epic lives, only to be plagued by nagging fears that we are in reality witnessing our own schizophrenic disintegration?

The answer is yes. No sitting on the fence with this one, dammit. We shall all be Quaids, bring on psychopathic Romance and lobotomy.

On the other hand, if human life did become a matter of configuring yourself as a hero at the centre of your own definable world, I am sure it could be no less banal than watching Ulrika Jonsson trying to re-inflate her vicious little career, or some c-list actor off of Casualty mincing about in a ballroom dance-off. I shudder to think what terrible crimes of entertainment I shall be performing to millions of adoring, computer-generated fans in ten years time. At least I won’t have to watch it.

Posted on January 24