If I invite you over to watch the Oscars (or the Super Bowl if you’re a straight guy), I am asking you to share an experience with me. Does that experience consist mostly of inflicting ourselves to advertisements together? Essentially yes. Whether it’s movies we should pay to see or football teams whose identity as commercial enterprises (even you, Packers) can’t be argued, televised events take place to sell us things.
Ads are increasingly entertaining, which is to say fun, and there’s nothing wrong with having a kind of mediated, managed, delivered fun together. It’s why I think you’re going to accept. We’ll together make our own constructed fun in the form of pretentious-speech snickering or tasty dips for chips. It’s part of the promise of inviting you over.
The problem with live tweeting*, I dunno, the VMAs, is that you haven’t accepted my invitation to do so. Which means you haven’t volunteered to submit yourself to advertising alongside me, and make no mistake: any tweets I—or you—might come up with about Miley Cyrus are advertisements for Cyrus, MTV, and whatever upcoming companies want to try to capitalize on 2013’s favorite dance-craze/wacky-word twerking.
No longer wanting to work as an advertiser for a product that saw me as little else is why I left Facebook. As a writer, I like the constraints of Twitter too much to abandon it, but here’s a practice I can happily ditch.
Now, can I encourage others to do so?
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*Live Tweeting‘s a redundant term, in that without third-party apps you can’t schedule tweets for later. It’s a hypercorrection or maybe a malapropism on live blogging, which—at least commercially—refers to something beyond the norm: posting blog entries immediately after they’re typed. I write this, but no way I’m going to change people’s usage on this one.
I can still live tweet movies on The Cupboard’s Twitter account though, right? Don’t take this away from me, Dave, it’s all I’ve got.