I'm Typing...I'm Tweeting...I'm in Love with Myself...

I usually try to stay abreast of new technology, even though I don’t always use technology that everyone else does. Admittedly, I have no cell phone and I refuse to buy an MP3 player (good music is a form of art—not something that you compress, package, market, and sell en masse like a Big Mac).

Another technological fad that is currently taking off is Twitter: a narcissistic blurb-making application which lets users tell the rest of the world what they’re doing, no matter how mundane it might be.

In fact, this self-centered real-time log program has become so popular that doctors are now “tweeting” from the operating room. ABC News reports:

As doctors Steven Kalkanis and Kost Elisevich performed brain surgery at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, a watchful medical team looked on. So did more than 1,900 others, who subscribe to the microblogging social network site Twitter—and had decided to “follow” Henry Ford Hospital.

[...]

Henry Ford Hospital has launched an unusual marriage of medicine and new media. The hospital began “twittering” some of its more groundbreaking surgical cases.

Doctors will post real-time “tweets” from the operating room, while a technician uploads video of the surgery to YouTube.

A technician installs a computer in a corner of the operating room. As surgeons scrub out of the surgery, they spend time answering questions “tweeted” in from around the country.

One reader asked, “I have a question: shouldn’t these surgeons be operating rather than tweeting?” The doctor who was interviewed for the story insists that “patient safety comes first,” which is good. I mean, I’d hate to hear something like, “Hold that clamp on the artery while I tweet about this.”

There’s no doubt that the argument could be made that blogs are also narcissistic. After all, we can use them to tell the world what we’re doing, what we’re thinking, why we believe what we believe, or anything else about which we wish to write. Twitter has become much more instant and much more mundane. A few weeks ago I saw one “tweet” from a guy who told the world about what kind of soy milk he was using on his cereal. Seriously, does this shit matter in the grand scheme of things?

If we’re tweeting from the operating room, maybe it does. I should just take a Valium and tune in to American Idol, The Bachelor, and Dancing with the Stars and everything will be okay. Then I can tweet about it.

Reference

Pinto, Barbara. “Using Twitter to Teach.” ABC News. 22 Mar. 2009.

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