The reports of the death of the Twinkie@ were premature. Invented in 1930, by the 1950's, when I was as boy, Twinkies were coming into their own as a hit snack treat. In those days, kids ate a lot of junk food, but nothing like what they do today. When I was in grade school, every kid had a lunchbox with a sandwich, a thermos of milk, a piece of fruit, a piece of vegetable, and a dessert (perhaps a candy bar or a slice of cake). As the junk food craze progressed, my generation began to eat more stuff like Twinkies, though it was generally frowned on. Twinkies were really nothing more than a kind of candy bar, puffed up and filled with vanilla cream. They had virtually no food value, and lots of sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and cholesterol.
In 2012, Hostess, the parent company of Twinkies, declared bankruptcy, and suspended production of Twinkies in the U.S. Some blamed workers' unions for causing the company to fail. Almost immediately, however, the Hostess (and Twinkie) brand was purchased by Apollo Global Management, which set up production in Canada, and resumed distribution of Twinkies in the U.S. Over the decades, people had become attached to Twinkies--they'd become a nostalgic fetish-object, and some people were devastated when they thought they'd never be able to purchase their old snack food ever again.
In 1978, during the trial of Dan White for the shootings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, White's attorney called a psychiatrist witness to support the allegation that his client had become emotionally unbalanced, as evidenced by his eating junk food, and the term The Twinkie Defense was born. White got a manslaughter instead of a murder conviction--one of the great instances of miscarriages of justice--since there was no question that White had done the deed, in retaliation for his supposed betrayal by the Mayor and Harvey Milk (an openly Gay public figure).
Twinkies have always symbolized the dumbing down of American consumerism. Their success proved that corporations could create a commodity which had virtually no inherent value, and was in fact made partly out of chemicals that weren't even traditionally regarded as food at all. It was a triumph of advertising and the seduction of customers with sugar and "mouth feel" (good sweet mushy goo).
When I grew up, telephones were very popular. By the mid-50's, old-fashioned party lines were being replaced with unique hook-ups, and talking on the phone, sometimes for hours at a time, was becoming all the rage. (That phrase all the rage marks me as a member of a much older generation, I suspect.) Teenagers spent time on the phone, because it allowed them to communicate privately, and they didn't even have to be in the same place to do it. It was a revelation.
With the arrival of CB radios, and then cell phones, the phone era jumped a step. The first cell phones were big and heavy, and early versions sat in a "shoe" or stand, where they could be easily recharged. In the beginning, they were primarily used by policemen and service people. But as the newer models became smaller and lighter, they began to be taken up by the general population. This is all boring history, of course, and today, with the new versions of hand-held devices, it's even possible to type words and messages, and transmit them in the same way e.mail does. They also have built-in cameras and even on-board video function. All these different kinds of uses are called "aps" (short for applications), and companies are striving to come up with ever-more startling kinds of "aps" software to put into these devices.
When the internet arrived, with its vast potential for joint communication and interactive exchange, people all over the world discovered they could talk with each other, and the internet supplanted much of the print universe, with instant phone, picture and video communication. The cathode ray tubes displayed a screen, with an accompanying keyboard adapted from the typewriter (with its QWERTY layout). When hand-helds began incorporating tiny keyboards, I didn't believe people would actually go for them, since I didn't see how anyone would choose to try to make text messages with a keyboard the size of a playing-card (or smaller). But I've been proved wrong.
Still, downsizing a keyboard has limits. No one can reasonably create very much text as efficiently on a hand-held keyboard as they can on a normal sized one. There are limits to what you can seduce people into believing. But the real effect of this downsizing has been to persuade users that rather than mourning the loss of the efficient creation of real text (within the limits of an efficient keyboard), they should embrace the new ridiculous keyboards by abbreviating their communications to just a few words per message.
This reduction has had the effect of curtailing all meaningful online communication, since people, especially younger people, tend to prefer the convenience of a hand-held device, to one they have to carry in a suitcase or in a large purse.
Portability has a long and proud tradition in human history. Anything people could carry would allow them a freedom of movement which made static, immovable objects seem like unnecessary burdens. As the world population grows, and people are forced to live closer and closer together in a world whose boundaries and limitations increasingly impinge on activity, the reductive tendency seems like an inevitable trend. In Hong Kong, there are "hotels" which are comprised of compartments little larger than an old train sleeper bunk, just big enough for a single person to squat in and sleep for a night.
The new generation of hand-helds offers people the illusion of freedom, but watching them use them gives one an entirely different impression. Rather than freeing people to pursue their lives away from home or office, they seem to have become a new kind of burden or obligation. Today, especially in cities and the suburbs, people seem more attached (or linked) to their devices than they are to their immediate environment. Rather than allowing people to live in their surroundings, they seem ineluctably drawn into the "chatter" and "update" of their network of electronic connections, than they are to their real-time presences. These new devices have become an end in themselves, supplanting the real purposes and possibilities of life itself. People are constantly getting empty reports and sending pointless messages to each other. In other words, the necessity of using the devices has trumped the presumed purpose of communication itself, as if just touching base with people was such an ingenious novelty that people would do it even if they had nothing whatever to say or communicate.
As the new phone-gadget craze has progressed, it has become clear that many of its users have become completely taken over with the phone world it creates. They live to text, or tweet, or "face" each other. Their lives are becoming increasingly uniform, slavishly "interactive" and dull. They read less, they notice less around them in the world, and they have shorter and shorter attention spans. In fact, they are ignoring or neglecting whole areas of their consciousness. They've become slaves of a new technology whose underlying purpose and function is to put their attention (and life-times) on a charging meter, requiring constant replacements and "upgrades" to stay current with the new buzz.
When personal computers arrived, many people thought that kids would only play "games" on them, and that's largely what's happened. I scoffed, but eventually found myself spending more and more time on a series of iterations of the home computer. The internet eventually became a revelation for me, but not for the reasons I would have suspected. I use the computer to blog, to write messages and "letters" and to buy and sell books (as well as other things). Having spent the better part of my life on typewriters, the transition to computer keyboards allowed me to expand the reach of my machine to the universe at large.
But these new hand-helds have actually shrunk the possibilities of the World Wide Web. While e.mail permitted instant communication, it didn't constrict content, the way the new tiny screens and keyboards do. If I were a teenager, using a computer to study and communicate with others would be a big opportunity to enlarge my sense of the world. But I don't think the tiny Twinkie world of hand-helds would have the same salutary effect.
Is the world today creating a new generation of idiots, illiterate electronic drones who speak the new dumbed-down shorthand of Twitter and Facebook? It seems so. These new little handy toys are making our minds decay, in the same way that junk food always has. You can get fat and mentally lazy consuming things that aren't good for you, whether it's sweet snacks, or quick little birdie tweets from your new online "friend."
Birdy go tweet tweet? Here's a yummy little morsel for you. Nighty-night.
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