Sorry, I Only Accept Communication Through Facebook Or Twitter Now
"netguy89: About to write whole internet column (SIGH) ...may use bathroom 1st. I'll tell you how both turn out."
See that up there? That's my latest tweet. I cross-posted it to Facebook too, as a status update. Not a big deal. Now, at least 1,000 of my closest Internet friends know exactly what I'm up to for the next half hour or so. If you're not among them, or your stupid 20th century brain can't comprehend what I'm saying, I have one thing to say to you: you're out of my life.
Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh. After all, it wasn't so long ago that the only way we could find out what somebody was doing was to manually text them during downtime at the movies or something. And really, if all you can manage to do is send me a text or leave me a freaking voicemail, that's fine for you. Really! I'm sure it's very hard for someone like you to keep up with all this. But until you maybe drop your stone tablet and chisel for a second and join the rest of the civilized world, I can't spend any more time talking to you.
Look at this. This is already more text I've written at one time in six months. Anyone reading this has probably already forgotten by now what we were even talking about. In YouTube form, this might have been bearable, especially if I spliced in some music and some footage of my friends being set on fire. But even then, you'd have to be subscribed to my YouTube channel to know that I uploaded a new video. Which you should be. Do you even know what YouTube is? And don't tell me about cat videos or some such shit, because we've all already seen all of them, 300 times, and left comments about how stupid the videos and all the other commenters are.
Face it: there's nothing you could possibly say to me IRL (in real life, man, try to keep up) or in some archaic form of media that couldn't be said faster, better, and more instantaneously-er using Twitter or Facebook. For example: I guess you want to hang out sometime soon, going by this obscenely long fucking email you just sent me? Okay. Take a deep breath. You can do this.
Step one: the next time you write me anything with two paragraphs, it better be detailed instructions on how to get a million blog visitors or something. Yes, it's true that I've abandoned my blog because it's a dead medium, but that's the kind of email I'd expect from you.
Step two: don't email me. The only reason I even check it is because it's integrated so well into my iPhone that I practically have to. Instead, get a fucking Twitter and write a tweet about hanging out with me. If I'm following you -- which is something that at this point I'd honestly be on the fence about -- I might tweet you back. We'll see. Thinking about it a little more, I'm realizing that hanging out would be pretty redundant, so I'd probably just write a tweet that invited you to look at my past tweets, and we could call it a night.
Besides, what would we even do if we hung out? We going to watch the DVD you just rented from Blockbuster? Wow, man. That's a pretty sweet setup you've got there. Maybe after that we can drive your Model-T Ford over to my place, where I can stream pretty much any movie ever made to my TV via, oh, I don't know, my home network? They have these things now, see, called computers, and broadband internet connections, and home media servers, and DVI-to-HDMI cables, and DVD decoding/ripping software and/or Bittorrent clients, or Blu-rays if you really want to make the most out of your 1080p TV and 7.1 channel speaker system (here's a hint: you do).
Are you starting to understand this? I really don't know how to break it down any further. Maybe I'll let you know when they invent a time machine, so that you can go back to 1946 or whatever, and stop feeling so overwhelmed. I'm sure you're good at other stuff, like listening to your CD player. That sounds like a lot of fun for you. You should just do that.
