‘With lightning telegrams...'

The Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was a big fan of telegrams. It was the height of communication technology at the time –- messages condensed down to their most efficient, poetic length and then zipped over wires at the speed of lightning (then delivered by a man riding about town on a bicycle, but nevermind). He was a man of his times. And so am I! I just joined Facebook -– apparently just a few minutes after it began its long downward slide into Friendster-dom (I’m guessing that New York mag profile is the highwater mark). As with Mayakovsky’s love of telegrams, I suspect social networking sites are an overexcited and ultimately useless misapplication of a useful technology. But never let it be said I didn’t try – and please don’t point out what Mayakovsky probably would have thought of Twitter.