Bruce the Blog

He rocks in the tree-top all a day long
Hoppin’ and a-boppin’ and a-singin’ the song
All the little birds on J-Bird St.
Love to hear the robin goin’ tweet tweet tweet

[Chorus]
Rockin’ robin (tweet tweet tweet)
Rockin’ robin (tweet tweet tweet)
Oh rockin’ robin well you really gonna rock tonight

Little did Bobby Day realize back in the day when he sang those lyrics by Jimmie Thomas and Leon Rene that “tweet tweet tweet” would come rockin’ back full force a half-century later in the form of digital craze du jour Twitter, where each 140-character- maximum message is called a “tweet.”

Microblogging web tool Twitter has six million registered users, a population projected to triple in 2010. Another moldy oldie that comes to mind Twitterwise is Eric Burdon and The Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

Those not in the know presume Twitter is just about people who are voyeurs, exhibitionists, egotists, or all the above, wiling away their time to let their “followers” know every move they make, every breath they take.

As with many technologies through the years, initial applications that quickly generate a wide base of users end up bearing little resemblance to productive and innovative uses that evolve. Suffice it to say we’ve come a long way since X-rated movies helped sell quite a few (million) VCRs in the 1980s. So it is with Twitter. Don’t judge it by such profound communiques as “@Rockinrobin is tweeting a tweet on Twitter. TTFN.”

Rather, Twitter has been used to make a marriage proposal, to “textualize” the kicking of an unborn baby, to send back a Martian message about “water ice,” to break the news of a plane crash and an earthquake, to make a job offer, and to possibly prevent a suicide, for which actress Demi Moore is credited. Those are courtesy of Ben Parr’s “10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates” on Mashable.com.

Here at North County News online community, NCNLocal, we’ve added a Twitter “badge” to our homepage. Our Sports Editor Isaac Cass is a pioneer in using Twitter to transmit by-the-basket play-by-play highschool game updates, fed to our website for anyone to view. We’re also using Twitter to post teasers at NCNLocal of what’s coming in the next issue. If you’re on Twitter, we welcome your tweets about what is happening in your life or in your neighborhood, and may use your tweet in the paper or online if it is of interest to enough others in our audience.

And yet … and yet … whither the devaluation of our cultural currency? American Idol. Sarah Boyle. Need I say more. No one denies some of these people are talented, but there is no proportion to the praise. It’s indiscriminate.

The answer is evident: people who entomb themselves in an electronic womb don’t get out much anymore, so what may be by sensible standards “talented” is distorted in the digital domain to a dumbed-up, trumped-up “genius.” If you spot any geniuses on “American Idol,” Twitter me so I can titter back at ya.

Where our frame of reference once was the 360-degree dimensions of everyday life’s length, width, and depth, it increasingly is measured in the two dimensions of diagonal inches and video resolution. Our thirst for instant gratification and addiction to mainlining digital streams has exacted more than a pound of flesh.

“We had faces then,” says Gloria Swanson as faded star Norma Desmond in iconic Hollywood classic “Sunset Boulevard.”

Now, we have screens.