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

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You are not alone

This week’s tweet deals with the ques­tion: Who are you talk­ing to?
Mr. bou­vierm tells us:

Who is Sarah? Well, that’s easy. Sarah is obvi­ous­ly bou­vierm’s actu­al girl-friend. That’s not that much of a sur­prise because Sarah is bou­vierm’s only con­tact in twit­ter. We real­ly hope this does not apply to his offline life. Take just a sec­ond with us to have a look into this boy’s lit­tle cos­mos.

Sad­ly enough Sarah gives updates only to friends. Luck­i­ly enough you can read any­thing she writes in twit­ter search. Well, it seems to be a hap­py cou­ple so we don’t want to rush into the their rela­tion­ship too much.

It’s inter­est­ing enough that bou­vierm tells twit­ter that there is going to hap­pen a sex­u­al thing between him and Sarah tonight. Why does he do that? It might be that he does­n’t know any­one can read his tweets and not only his only fol­low­er. Well, as you saw, even if you lock your updates they’re not real­ly locked.

But inso­far it could be part of a game or some­thing. You know these “hide and seek in the inter­net, although we’re a cou­ple in real­i­ty” games, don’t ya ? Besides, there’s no real advan­tage in get­ting an SMS from twit­ter instead get­ting it from your mobile, is there? You see, many ques­tions arise from this infor­ma­tion although there’s no need for us to know more about it.

So, here’s a lit­tle bit crit­i­cal think­ing: Are we some kind of rude in hav­ing a look into that pri­vate sphere? Well, that real­ly could be, but any­how bou­vierm does­n’t seem to act that much on decen­cy him­self…

… and is so busy we don’t think he cares that much:

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The feedback

The tweet of this week is the fol­low­ing:


This one real­ly made me laugh. In eng­lish it’s “Swal­low. Get­ting feed­back in a minute.” Well, maybe it’s just me hav­ing too much sex­u­al moti­vat­ed thoughts due to read­ing too much hor­ri­ble stuff on twit­ter.

The real sto­ry must be some­thing like Fräulein Schnute is shocked, because she gets feed­back soon to some­thing she does­n’t tell us. Maybe some­thing con­nect­ed to her job. But how can we pos­si­bly get just that one pic­ture, just that one sto­ry?

There’s a dif­fer­ent sto­ry with­in this tweet that came up in my mind first. I don’t wan­na paint the whole pic­ture to you. I’m sure you can do that on your own and in more fas­ci­nat­ing colours than any­thing I could write by now.

This com­bined with the infor­ma­tion some­one bee­ing the more active part with­in this sto­ry should get a *feed­back* in a minute — real­ly shocked me.

Link: Have a look at Fräulein Schnute’s beau­ti­ful web­site to find out more about her.

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