Twittering Up

Just joined twitter and right away it seems I am out of my depth. This constant updating seems appropriate for celebrities or fighter pilots sneaking in below the radar but I cannot (yet) take myself seriously enough to announce my breakfast to the world.

This network is all about the first person, the magnificently expanding subject who now is global, or at least the affluent and technological global, the small elite who stretch across the world at key nodal points.

Yet to ignore twitter is to fall behind—this has been the standard pessimistic argument for why one should be Modern, if you are not Modern , then you are forgotten. People have been arguing this point since the nineteenth century.

So first reactions: Twitter is ideally suited for Versailles and the court of the French king, where the rise and supping of the monarch was important news to the ten thousand who lived in his proximity.

Twitter is a new form of the levee. When we can read how Lance Armstrong was awoken by anti-doping control agents and what television program he watched before bed, he is acting not so very different than Louis XIV. Except of course the monarch would grant a duke the honor of actually entering the update, perhaps Lance, too, as a twitter aide.

Now we all get to experience ourselves as the sun king, so many sun kings, what is the value in such grandiosity when so many can sign up?

Here endeth the first twitter blog sermon