internet

For those who don't know or rather dismiss cultural milestones that have anything to do with social media, the blue birdy network known as Twitter just turned 7 years old.

In dog years that equates to 49.

I use the metaphor of dog years because in the break neck speed of technology, social fatigue, and years lost refreshing and scrolling, 7 years can feel a whole lot like 49. 

If we took this metaphor a step further, a lot of this dog years stuff makes quite a bit of sense when we shed a light on Twitter's counterparts, i.e. the Googles and FBs.

Google being the oldest would be dead (according to teeny bopper metrics it already is) and Facebook as the rapidly deteriorating middle child would be in a nursing home.

As the youngest of the power three, Twitter by certain accounts, arguably appears to have aged gracefully by comparison to its siblings. 

Introduced foremost to the world as an information aggregator, it's become a communicative essential; and as a marketing platform conceivably more malleable than the cluttered ethos that now constricts Facebook.

7 years ago Twitter focused on the public need of dissemination.

Slowly it made hashtags cultural staples, and @ signs the go-to symbols for contacting people and companies. 

It was an open party, but it was one always built for a wider audience. 

By contrast, FB and Google came up as niche communities, the former built at first on a network of collegiate students, the latter on people who strictly yearned for an efficient Internet search and a better e-mail alternative to Hotmail.

Their struggles with capturing social networking are well-documented and in a fickle mobile marketplace where people go with what's cool, Twitter has survived those pitfalls because it remains based on the principles of offering a fundamental human service rather than cheap thrills. 

Biz's bird child isn’t perfect, but in its middle age it seemingly has more fight rather flight, gracefully remaining relevant in a space where what you did 1 minute ago can seem like a light year. 

(image via The Times)

Follow Anthony on Twitter: @antbrent

Eleven years after the September 11^th attacks, I woke up to an eerily similar day. Clear skies, nice weather, and, more or less, a noticeable amount of silence. I remember that day, first I heard the planes and then I watched the towers fall. I remember thinking how small the world had gotten, how actions elicit violent response and how this day should remind us that the world, not just Americans, must work more closely for less war and stronger relationships with, at the very least, mutual respect and understanding. Destiny sent us in an opposite direction. It sent the world toward conflict and war. 

I will argue for a new Nigerian literary order.

Suppose we call this ‘neo-literariness’, for want of a better word, and because in hyphenation a word acquires two identities. So, neo-literariness is the word to use for a generation of writers and enthusiasts who function despite institutional lapses, and whose artistic engagement thrives of new ways of being, especially web-technology.

I will explain with a few examples.

Letter to an Aspiring Correspondent

PRAGUE – Foreign correspondence is dead. Long live foreign correspondence!

In the space of a week, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina have arguably become the world's most famous political prisoners following their sentencing in a Moscow courtroom last Friday.

BEIJING - I woke up at 6am this morning to discover that my main Gmail account was sending out emails to all of my contacts. I quickly tried to change the password, and discovered that I couldn’t because Gmail takes you first to a plus.google.com domain, and all “plus” sites in China are blocked. I did an SSH tunnel just to change my password, something usually reserved for the times when I want to sneak a peak at Facebook or Twitter.

New York: The Frederick P. Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union, a twisted lecture hall of aluminum and mesh wire, seemed a most-fitting setting for Monday night's event entitled, "Breaking Through Internet Censorship." Scheduled on the, "World Day Against Cyber Censorship" (Reporters Without Borders), this chilling event explored the citizenry of surfing the world wide web...and being watched, censored, and hunted in the process.