philfiles

Also: is Twitter making philfiles obsolete?

Apologies for the neglect. In a flurry of packing tape and bubble wrap, my blogging muse was carelessly tossed in an unlabeled box; it sat squirming somewhere between my rosary and Catcher in the Rye. I blame the movers.

But excuses are boring. What’s not boring is my account of moving out. Under my couch I found varied and sundry items: jelly beans, a federal court brief, a beer bottle, and congealed salsa-like substances … which together seems like an excellent metaphor for my year in Chelsea.

After nearly five years (already?), my blogging muse is nothing if not resilient, resisting an avalanche of finals, graduation, a cross-borough ford to the scrappy shores of Brooklyn, NY. It has been surviving, defiantly, in 140 characters or less. Like salsa, you can’t get rid of it (apparently). It just takes different forms.

But as those first tweets gather into a steady ROAR, (thanks to Oprah,) I can’t help but wonder whether blogging is becoming a clumsy medium of a bygone digital era. Unlike Blogger/WordPress, which require set-up and design, Twitter and Facebook provide insta-blogging, jettisoning formalities for a relentless barrage of #, @, “like” buttons, and tinyurls.

It seems tempting to say that these steady twitter spurts will slowly overtake meandering posts (especially by surly law students). If Tweets are like swift, real-time text messages, blogs are voicemails in Southern drawl. Twitter tells you what an enormous number of strangers are thinking — right now. An electonic snapshot of the vox populi, companies are flooding the website, craning their ears to hear the 16, 17, and 18 year-old squeaks of potential customers.

But while the firing of these robotic neurons will (profitably) tell us what is going on right now — especially IMPORTANT ISSUES OF THE DAY, like Gossip Girl and Madonna’s bowel movements — they will not tell us why they are “important.” They will not tell us what they mean, who they will affect, or how long they will even last. As a cold newsticker of personal headlines, Twitter sits in the hands of The Fates, nimbly spinning out the present, present, present — and never the past.

So when a TV executive wants to see how his Tickle Me Beanie Baby telethon performed, or Arianna wants to see how mad her headlines made Newt Gingrich, they should put their two fingers on Twitters’ pulse. But if they want to see what made them tweet-worthy in the first place, they will still have to log into the Economist.com or some snarky blog by a law GRADUATE, as always.

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