britt.illtemper

I think I’ve just figured out why it annoys me when people trivialise the conversations that take place on Twitter and Tumblr as merely ‘talking about what you had for breakfast’. Mostly I find these are the same people who quite happily sit around for hours and hours engaged in the most inane, insufferable real-life small talk. Where they ate dinner last night, what their hotel in Noosa was like, how their favourite sport team is going.

In contrast, the conversations I encounter online tend to be more interesting than most of the conversations I have in real life. At their best these conversations are far from small talk. They explore issues that don’t belong in mainstream discourse, in far more depth than real-world social interactions normally allow. They show an intellectual curiosity that defies the shallow expectations of our culture.

Trivialising these online conversations as merely being about early-morning epicurean tendencies reflects a naivety and disconnectedness that I’d suggest says more about the speaker than his subject.