The Death of Myspace... or things not said in 140 characters.

Myspace's revamped website, and their obvious downsizing of blogs as an important part of each profile, will draw to an end my using of myspace as a place where I post blogs. Fortunately, I have all of them printed out in notebooks, as well as at my blogspot website:

http://denzilpugh.blogspot.com

Also, while I will answer any mail sent to me through myspace, I no longer find it necessary to keep an active participation in their website, as Facebook has consistently become the place for social networking. Although, like myspace, they seem to find little need for blogging, and have eliminated the RSS feed function in sharing pages.

It seems that the world is now communicating through text boxes of 140 characters or less.... Twitter has fundamentally changed the way people communicate with each other, and, as Neil Postman has said, "The Medium is the Message." We cannot hope to form intelligent ideas if we have to think in 140 character sets. It just won't work that way. That, along with the visual/oral media through Youtube and other sites, makes everything instant, without the need to think before the words come rolling out. It's ironic, in this era where there is more information than ever spewed out of every media, that more and more of it is utterly meaningless. In every hour of a 24 hour news channel, there might be 2 points of news that have not been repeated over and over again the whole day. In every tweet, they virtually say nothing save that X,Y,and Z celebrity is going to this beach or that gym.

How many people will live their whole lives and never make the synaptic connections to form an original thought? And, how many people, if they've made that connection, will have the medium necessary to communicate that thought to the world. And of course, how many people, given the ability to think and the desire to communicate... will anyone listen? Does anyone read the blogs that I write? I've had this thought before. And then... do I care? It is enough that I have the need to communicate, it is up to others to comprehend. As bloggers, as communicators in this Internet age, we sit in front of little boxes and fling our thoughts out to the data streams and hope that others will find them and take those thoughts with them. We must continue to forward the frontiers of human thought, so that more boundaries will be crossed, more unknowns will become known, more ideas will be transmitted to those who are just beginning to think, so that we will all not just be reinventing wheels.