Demonstrated by one conversation and described in one word.
Peter Sagal (NPR host): Another day, another Red Carpet Club, another shocking number of bananas stuffed into my bag.
United Airlines: @petersagal Put the bananas down and step away from the Red Carpet Club. We have been on to you for weeks. Does NPR not feed you?
Sagal:@unitedairlines They don’t… all of us have to go out and hunt/gather food for the NPR commissary. Lst wk, Totenberg killed a deer w/ pen.
Love it. How can you not?
So that’s the conversation. Your one word?
Human.
Twitter works because it allows us to remember that behind every computer and every corporation we’re all just us. We want to be silly. We want to connect. We want to be ourselves.
And the funny thing is, when we do that, we can become more successful than we ever could trying to be “corporate”.
In last month’s issue of Wired (yes, I am a geek, I’m not arguing, but in my defense, the subscription was free, I swear) Steven Levy has a really lovely piece called “Losing the Magic” about our tendency to become inured by technology. Go check it out; it’s a quick read.
I know: a Wired article, “lovely”? But it is. It’s even a bit wistful.
He quotes Arthur C. Clarke‘s wonderful observation, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and asks, “What happens when magic is an everyday occurrence?”
Isn’t that a stunning question?
How much of life is magic that’s just wasted on us? What are we missing by not taking the time to see it?
Please let yourself be amazed today.
(…hee, and yes, now I am going to have Lonestar stuck in my head for the rest of the night. The things I do for you people….)
If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you saw me post this video and mention how much I love the MSNBC scriptwriter who got away with this. (Rachel Maddow, also of MSNBC, also had a good time with her report.) And I was crying, I was laughing so hard watching it. But when you think about it, isn’t it sad, too? It’s stunning how out of touch these people are (and whether it’s the actual elected Republicans, or whether it’s Fox News, I can’t tell). But they’re pouring time and money into a campaign that is now pretty difficult to take seriously.
@shoot_the_moon pointed out that it’s probably just because nobody would be the first to admit to knowing what the term meant. (Which, come on. It’s been on Regis & Kelly. Not exactly underground.)
But what I find sad is that nobody apparently had the nerve to tell the emperor he had no clothes. And when people who are trying to help our country don’t even have that – what do we have?
I can go Saturday 25th April or Sunday 31st May… and I very much plan to. But, it’d be more fun not alone.
I figured it’d be better to just put it out here because, well, not everybody’s an Impressionist geek, and I didn’t want to make anyone feel bad for not actually wanting to go.
Because, you know, otherwise I’d be going alooooone, sniffle sniffle. Alllll alooooooone….
