What are you doing?

It’s hard to fight the feeling that ours is a civilization in decline. When T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922, he set out to record this decline and to allow existence itself to give voice to its own meaninglessness and sterility. He mimicked the banal, futile chatter of day to day life:

“If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.”

“Others can pick and choose if you can't.”

“But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.”

“You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.”

“(And her only thirty-one.)”

But we don’t need T.S. Eliot anymore (which is lucky, since he’s dead). No, we have Twitter to record society's vacant, witless ramblings. In case you don’t know, Twitter is a ‘micro-blog’ site. It’s a blog for people who can’t be bothered to sit down and actually write a blog, instead they just post ‘updates’ of no more than 140 characters. No doubt Eliot’s blank-eyed chatterers would have been amongst the first to sign up.

The clue’s in the name. The word ‘Twitter’ is an amalgam of ‘twit and witter’ which is vastly appropriate as it seems ideally suited to wittering twits. You don’t have to think of a subject or plan and write a detailed or structured entry, all you need to do is answer the daily question, which is the never changing ‘what are you doing?’ and over a period of weeks you create a patchwork quilt of banality. ‘Eating toast’, ‘not much’, ‘sitting at my computer’, ‘getting ready to go to the shop’, ‘chilling’, ‘drinking beer’, 'about to go to bed', ‘waiting for a pizza’. It’s a record of countless thousands of empty lives, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

However, it's statistically unlikely (if not impossible) that absolutely everyone on Twitter is a vacuous idiot. The fact is, 140 characters is not enough to allow you to express anything other than the most basic information, so even if you want to wax lyrical or fully express an interesting thought or idea, you can’t. It’s virtually impossible to sound intelligent using Twitter. Even Stephen Hawking would sound dimwitted. ‘Just finished writing another book about the Universe and stuff. Going to have early night tonight.’

Twitter's format alone is a telling sign of current societal trends: the posts require the bare minuimum of mental input on the part of the user. They have no real subject, require very little time or effort to create and are essentially pointless. It's entirely based in the present: 'What are you doing?' It asks. People are encouraged to 'live in the moment.' The past has been all but eradicated, few people have a really good grasp of history due to the dumbing down of the subject in schools. The future is too alarming to contemplate, with one apocalyptic scare after another. In such a climate, it's little wonder why the simplistic immediacy of Twitter is so popular.

It’s a digital desert: the Waste Land of the internet.

Unreal City

'Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn...'

Despite living in Edinburgh for the past eight years of my life, I've never really got used to it. It's like no other city in Britain. When you stand on Princes Street and look out across the gardens to the Old Town, the strange, tall buildings seem to hover behind the trees like a stage backdrop. The castle also seems unreal, but more sturdy: like an impressively large prop made from papier maché, cardboard, sticky back plastic and paint.

In the morning, commuters seem resolutely determined to ignore the sights on display. They hurry along Princes Street, their heads held low. In the summer, it is estimated that the population of Edinburgh almost doubles. In my experience, I would say that it triples. The cash machines run out of money, getting to work takes twice the time (as the bus is repeatedly flagged down like a taxi by deeply tanned, bemused tourists waving £20 notes) and the supermarkets fail to cope with demand, leading to shortages of staple goods such as bread, milk and most importantly, decent houmous.

In the face of such an invasion, even a welcome one, the genuine inhabitants of Edinburgh feel a basic and natural urge to mark themselves out. They fail to acknowledge even the most noticable landmarks and monuments, they most certainly don’t carry a camera around and they also tend to avoid any shop that sells tartan, shortbread, or tartan-patterned tins of shortbread. Even celebrities get short shrift during the festival. Since moving to Edinburgh I’ve ignored the following people: Jimmy Carr (he was buying fish and chips, I gave him a blank look), David Baddiel (he passed me as I was walking along George Street) and several others, mainly stand up comedians. They may be famous, but during the festival they’re just tourists: getting in the way, filling the streets, eating all the houmous. It’s just not on.

So yes, Edinburgh is very strange. It’s hard to just get on with day to day life when you feel like an extra on a very large film set. So instead, we all focus on the mundane: gazing out of the top deck of a bus not at the castle but at HMV. Avoiding the Royal Mile and heading to Poundstretchers on North Bridge instead. Maybe we should stop ignoring where we live, and start embracing it. I’ve decided to spend a day as a tourist this weekend. I’m going to ride an open top bus, visit the castle for the first time and buy questionable shortbread from a stall on the Royal Mile. Wish me luck.