Bashing Twitter’s Bashers

Roger Cohen is tired of Twitter bashers: “It’s not easy, being of a certain generation, to avoid the dinner conversation that veers into a lament about the short attention spans, constant device distraction, sad superficiality and online exhibitionism of a younger generation geared to life in 140 characters or less.

“You have to duck under the table or at least bite your lip as yet another jeremiad about the depredations of social media unfurls. How the screen has taken over. How flirting is not what it used to be. How genuine experience is being lost. It is as if baby boomers had all fallen prey to some collective amnesia about the fact that our parents, equally, understood nothing about how we communicated, how we interacted, how we dated and how we mated.”

Cohen thinks this reveals one of the timeless realities – “the curmudgeonly tendencies of the aging”: “Seduced by all the 60-is-the-new-40 babble, they fail to see that their irritation about Twitter, Snapchat and the rest is in essence irritation at the new, and that in their grumbling the most potent factors are incomprehension and sheer incapacity.”

I admit it. I was once of their number. I joined Twitter to keep track of my kids, and so I could bash their short attention spans. 

Then Pastor Douglas Wilson observed that tweets are like proverbs. You try to capture, in a haiku flash, some of the goodness and beauty of things. Doug was right: Now they’re faster and they’re more of them, and more that are useless, but folks have been tweeting since the dawn of time. Doug made Twitter sound like a writer’s challenge, and I took it up. 

Not that I’ve conceded the privilege, at my age, to bash new technologies at whim.