I am an avid user of Twitter. If you’re not following me on there and you’re all about the Twitter, please feel free to follow me at flyMachias. While I talk about my piloting adventures on there, I talk about a lot of other stuff as well. It’s like a mini-version of this blog but with more frequent updates.
One of the thing I like about Twitter, at least until the company messes up the stream by “curating” what the users see, is that you can get breaking news quickly. A couple of years ago when the earthquake rocked Virginia, and subsequently the northeast, I actually saw it on Twitter a split second before my computer monitors at work started rocking from the same earthquake. When a celebrity passes on, I always see it on Twitter first. It’s like Twitter contains the pulse of what’s going on in the world.
One of the accounts I follow is @breakingnews. Since I rely on Twitter for news information, it makes sense to follow @breakingnews. They often tweet important things, like the number of people that have died from Ebola, details of a shooting in Europe and details of the latest unrest in the Middle East. This brings credibility to the account, in my eyes, and it sets a certain expectation for me. So imagine my disappointment when not one, but two tweets today were devoted to this drivel:
Now, I know I’m getting old. At 46 years old, I realize that I am seeing the world in a different way than those of the younger generation and I often my comparisons between my reactions to a given topic versus what my father or grandfather would have said. So, be that as it may, after looking up Rhianna and realizing who she was (she came around after my days in radio), I realized that not only is this woman the epitome of everything that is wrong with the entertainment industry today, I doubt that whether her song is played before a football game on CBS really qualifies as “Breaking News”. I mean, if this is what is breaking news in the United States, then I’d say we have all our poverty, health care, human dignity, governmental, etc., problems solved and we should therefore devote our time to trivial things. But the truth of the matter is, there’s a LOT of stuff going on in the world today, and quite frankly, whether or not this Rhianna woman’s song is going to be played is not even in the Top 200.
I call this “distracting the masses.”
Going through the recent tweets of @breakingnews to research a little bit for this blog entry, I realized that they also have a tendency to include Apple news as breaking news. News flash, unless Apple has had a massive security breach, has been nuked by a terrorist, or has outright purchased the United States Government for a bargain basement price (face it, we’d be on a corner rack in Filene’s Basement if that chain was still around), nothing that Apple does is “Breaking News”. It’s more distraction. And because people are celebrating the steady decline of the average IQ by applauding mediocrity and reducing their world view to a very tunneled down definition, the masses are distracted easily.
So now I’m wondering if I should unfollow @breakingnews and go with something a little less ridiculous. If anyone has any suggestions of another Twitter account of follow, I would welcome the input.
