• by Jack Feuer , May 13, 2009

OK, you're a digital citizen, building a bright future, one digit at a time. You disdain primitives like me, who think the Twitterati are ju

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Oh, I'm sorry. You were expecting more? But, dear children, that's 140 characters up there -- with spaces. Those are the boundaries of your universe, are they not?

Surely, all the knowledge that ever was or ever will be, not to mention the Future of All Media, is cozily contained within the above space? No? Ah, my apologies. I thought you were just fine, thank you, with trying to stay connected to friends, family, brands and consumers via the communications equivalent of the box they put Abu Zubaydah into at Gitmo.

Considering I had to disconnect the conversation in the middle of the second sentence of the column, it seems to me a fairly inefficient way to talk to anybody. But that would be thought-crime.

140 characters is perfect for you because you have never been compelled to finish a sentence, complete a thought or dive any deeper than the shallow end of the information pool. Whatever you needed, you Googled.

Or in my son's case, you got your father to Google what you needed, because God forbid you should have a laptop for more than a week without spilling a Red Bull on it, drowning it in the toilet because you were listening to Limewire, or throwing it at the wall in your apartment because your skinny girlfriend has changed her mind for the 14th time this week about where she wants to live, what she wants to do, and whether or not she wants you involved in any of it.

Here's a tweet both my son and I can get behind: Love stinks.

Look, I get it. Even your education bent itself to the digital will. Teachers and professors labored to put verities into quick, simple metaphors you could understand. All they ever came up with were lame hip-hop references. Most of which totaled somewhere around 200 characters, so they lost you at "bitch."

But all you need from your interactions with the rest of the world is speed, so it's good. And social conformity, which is great. And if you're a company corp comm troll patrolling Twitter to make sure nobody says anything mean about your fabulous products, services, or your CEO's $250,00 remodeling of her office bathroom, it's even better. Because you can ignore the proles who don't know what "crowdsourcing" means and reward the Outer Party members who follow your top management's C-tweets.

Marketing, good or bad, has always been a relatively benign form of brainwashing. But tech-enabled, it is much more.

It is newspeak.

If you can't tweet, you don't belong. If you don't blog, don't bother showing up. If you have no Friends, you have no future.

Digitize or die.

Ignorance is strength.

Orwell was off by 25 years. But the clocks are finally striking thirteen.

By the way, the above line is only 73 characters -- with spaces.

So I'm good.