Something oddly familiar

Mediaite editor Rachel Sklar on Twitter: "Home! And on my 4th bowl of soup. My mommy makes yummy soup." Well, this sample of over-sharing is one reason why I don't do Twitter much these days. Sure, it has it uses. But I've been falling out of love with it for some time. You might say, "The thrill is gone, baby" ― as the great BB King would sing it. Apart from taking Disraeli to heart ― “The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation” ― I've also come to realize that Twitter wasn't adding much to my intellectual life. Yeah, I know ― Twitter intellection is an oxymoron. Still, I mainly follow top-tier journos and pundits, for chrissakes. You'd think a scrap of erudition would show itself occasionally. But the twitterese I mainly encounter is cynical or infantile and oh so tiresome. Much of it is posted by Twitterholics. (When the Nation's Greg Mitchell tweeted: "Ha, first time tweeting from highway stop on way to son's movie premiere," I had to go all "unfollow" on the dude and cut him loose.) Twitter has always struck me as oddly familiar, though I could never put my finger on it. But it finally dawned on me: Twitter is high school, digitally re-lived on a campus that never closes. It's a vast playground populated by cool kids, nerds, bullies, student body presidents (or wannabes), prom queens (or wannabes), Beavis & Butthead, Napoleon Dynamite, and his pal Pedro. Which helps to explain the 10th grade-level discourse. Kurt Vonnegut famously said, "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." Or, I might add, Twitter.