Albert Brooks is now on Twitter and the world is a funnier place:
Rough night. took ambien. woke at 3A.M. had a turkey sandwich. this morning daughters parrot’s missing. I’m shitting feathers. coincidence?AlbertBrooks Albert Brooks
Just finished Mein Kampf. Had no idea it was the same guy.
Thank you, Mr. Brooks.
I know many of you are, to say the least, wary of Twitter. I don’t blame you at all. I avoided it for a long time, only signed up under pressure from my publisher to promote my book last year, and approached it with a lot of eye-rolling and sighing about how the 140-character limit would be an oppressive bind on my beautiful, beautiful words. I know Alex (or @AlexBelth, if you will) has some doubts about it. And it’s far from perfect – it can be silly, shallow, repetitive, a self-promoting extravaganza. But it can also be funny and useful and downright supportive. It did end up being useful for book promotion and networking and what have you, but I’ve also made actual, flesh-and-blood friends through Twitter; for me, anyway, it helped me connect with people I might not have otherwise. So I know it’s not for everyone and understand the reasons for avoidance, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Well, mostly.
Anyway, via Hardball Talk, here’s a list of more than 200 MLB players with verified Twitter accounts, from Bobby Abreu (mostly in Spanish) to Ben Zobrist (yawn). Most of these guys, in my experience, aren’t a fascinating read – most are too PR-savvy and/or not great with words. I still follow my guy Denard Span, but only because I’m still hoping to find out whether he has any short, poorly coordinated Jewish relatives. And sometimes players slip the PR leash, for better or worse: the Rays’ Logan Morrison is usuallyentertaining, as is Dirk Hayhurst, author of The Bullpen Gospels. Nick Swisher does a lot of charity work on there. So does Curtis Granderson, who has also been pondering his at-bat music for this season; Ozzie Guillen is just as hilariously semi-comprehensible as you might’ve hoped. And the other night the Orioles’ Adam Jones tweeted a photo of turtles having sex.
Have fun out there, kids.
Malcolm Gladwell on “The Twitter Revolution”:
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”
These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?
