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.