The mixer
This week we just can’t ignore the most discussed new german twitter user: It’s the Secretary-General of the german party SPD, Hubertus Heil. He used twitter during his visit in the United States, where he attended the Obama show in Denver. There are quite interesting negative and positive reactions to this new hobby of Mr. Heil. You can find these reactions in twitter and in an article of the german lifestyle magazine
Der Spiegel.
It’s a correct estimation to say that sometimes you’ll be criticized immediately if you do something for getting publicity. You can see the article in Der Spiegel quite easyily as that of kind of criticism. But not every criticism that comes up quickly is intrinsically wrong.
We don’t mind politicians doing things that normal citizens do as well. We do mind if they’re just pretending to do so. It’s one characteristic of the political strategy of Obama, Heil’s idol and reason to come to Denver, to make clear he’s not that kind of faker. Believe it or not. In America the media don’t believe that completely and therefor they’re talking about playing cards.
One thing that is crystal clear is that Heil’s showing up on twitter was planned as a part of his political actions. You can see that in one of the deleted tweets of his account:
Most irritating this plan did not result in presenting any own political idea. It also sounds like this whole action wasn’t his own idea. And though twitter is much about pretending and the idea that there is no nonconformity of tweets, because these belong to the subjective manner to describe reality, Heil is definitely a candidate for TMI to us.
This is so because Heil continuously mixes private, journalistic and politcal stuff in his tweets. It’s not clear if he wants to be on twitter as a private man, a politician or a journalist. Actually there are enough journalists and Heil’s private life does not attract many people.
In this week’s tweet this mixing is inherent:
Heil tells us that the members of the german Bundestag Rolf Mützenich and Niels Annen bought a skateboard and shoes during their visit and that they now can get back to work all together.
Is this a political information or a private one? We do think it deals with private matters of Mützenich and Annen. And for sure there will be journalists to see this in a political context. Anyhow, Heil does not make clear what relevance his tweets have and how they should be seen as.
Perhaps we should read Heil’s statements as the following tweet should be read, where he tells us how Obama should call his wife:
Bullshit. [1]
So finally it turns out that the twitter question to Mr. Heil has to be posed more exactly: “What the fuck are you doing?”
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[1] following Harry Frankfurt On bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005
Der japanische Zettelknicker
Es gibt derzeit einen japanisch-amerikanischen Insider. Die Amerikaner verstehen nicht die Intention dieses kleinen, japanischen Videoclips, finden ihn aber lustig, was den ganzen Insider nun auch schon ausmacht. Hier mal das Original:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCKjctTWIsw&w=425&h=355]
Was will uns dieser Japaner sagen? Ich würde ja eine neue Oscar-Kategorie vorschlagen. Der Oscar für die eindringlichste neue Körperhaltungsausdrucksgeste geht an.….
The schemer
This week’s tweet is not much about fun. It’s in a way just a statement. IKEA paid a guy to stay in a room where he’s being filmed all day. This was posted in quiet a few blogs already. And as Nils now turns out to be one of the top german twitter users regarding counted followers we had a short look at him.
You know, in the old days action artists did something special. Sometimes that was disturbing. And that kind of disturbance was the essence of their art.
The art of this guy is just to sit and wait. But not in the Sidney Youngblood manner. He’s just waiting in a room for the new IKEA catalogue coming out in September and that’s all he does in August. And as the time runs out in August he tells us:
In the moment when he could really do something special, a thing he could have prepared himself for the last couple of weeks, he is not able to present it in a way that does not leave everyone bored behind: “I hope the postman brings the new IKEA catalouge. I’m really looking forward for trying out my new life.”
Boy, IKEA stuff is not for life. It’s for not spending much money. If that is a topper of your old life and the starting point of your new, we’ve really got no clue how simple you are.
If this project was just a little bit more intelligent maybe you could see some irony in it. For sure there are some guys in twitter, that sit before their computer the whole day. Seen that way this project could be a mirror to them. But how numb is it to say the solution to that problem was shopping?
This whole thing is an old idea with no new elements and it deals only with minimalism. A minimalism that is supposed to be special due to not fulfilling expectations. Dear IKEA and Nils: We had none. And that’s going to be the essential thing connected to you.
The clever doggie
If people on twitter don’t talk about themselves or their problems, they talk about news, tv, films, other people or animals. If they talk about animals, quite often they talk about their pets. And if they talk about pets then they talk about things they did wrong. You can hardly ever read a description of a really rightful done action of a pet. Or maybe that’s just my perception. It just seems not to be too interesting to talk about that.
If twitter users do not talk about their pets, but about animals, it’s about animals in their environment not belonging to them. Brittt is one of them. It does not slip her attention what and how animals act that are near to her. So she writes:
The first thing I thought is something, I suppose none of you thought. I thought: What a clever doggie. He comes into the room, recognizes that the window is open, jumps upon the windowsill and does his business outside for not soiling the room. Good boy!
Too sad a second later I thought that wasn’t Brittt’s story. She in a way wanted to tell that a dog was shitting outside her house and that she could watch him doing his business. And the open window seems to be a link to me that she even smelled that happening through her open window.
I don’t wanna care. I think my story is much more compelling.
The nothing
Ladies and Gents, this week’s tweet is THE tweet.
It’s the ultimate tweet.
It contains basics any twitter user uses. And it’s more. It’s art.
What kind of art it is, is what we need to find out.
So here’s what the tweet of the week is all about. Doomshammer says? Writes? Shows? This:
This is more than just a tweet. This is more than just playing a tiny technical game. This is a theoretical and practical expression of the nothing:
On the one hand you don’t find a single viewable sign to identify.
On the other hand and as a result of the former you don’t find any abstract information within this tweet apart from the author’s name, the software he uses, the star and the time the tweet was made. If you want to talk about this tweet you are urged to refer to nothingness.
It was Martin Heidegger claiming the nothing noths (“Das Nichts nichtet.”). You can object against Heidegger that his hardly understandable usage of turning nouns into verbs is not a possible way to identify truth. But this objection could fail due to just revealing yourself as being pigheaded. The mistake of defining how to identify truth could lie in your own assumptions. But without trying to glorify Heidegger we have to state that Doomshammer shows there’s still something after the nothing has left.
Leave is defined by Heidegger with the following:
This is in english: “Leave is the absented arrival of the hiding of keeping the progress in the beginning.” So Doomshammers’ expression is both the absence of any tweet content and the beginning of any tweet.
So do not let Doomshammer fool you by linking to his own tweet as a tweet of emptiness:
You might still want to say, we’re missing the point. We’re over-interpreting the whole tweet. We don’t have any interesting TMIs left and are urged to lift this up to one. Doomshammer’s just a nerd having fun with his iPhone.
So if that would be right our text would be TMI. If not we would have proven the incredible kind of art of this tweet.
We actually think we can prove our thesis.
We can’t do this theoretically but within practise, within one of the artist’s tweet. Take a look at what Doomshammer threw like an unsatisfying painting into the trash bin just a second before revealing his masterpiece:
The masturbation smiley
This week’s tweet is one you could have suspected as that kind of type this project would have started with. Talking about information that is just too much on twitter is mostly information about sexual habits.
This is one of them and one that is quite compromised:
The simplicity of the message turns out to rise a lot of questions:
Does Tony really do that what he claims to do or is he just kidding? Is that an information he really wants to share with others? What kind of profit would someone else have with this information? Is there no one within Tony’s world that feels uncomfortable with his?
Tony doesn’t seem to bother about those questions. He even seems to be a rather relaxing guy having the time to post a tweet while coming into action. But why is he adding a smiley to his post? Does he think: Well, you hadn’t expect I would really write this, he? Is he thinking adding a smiley makes an action cool? Is the same content better without a reference to smiling (besides on the avatar) ?
Well, think about that. Or rather don’t :).