Please tweet me the Tempranillo
A savage showdown between Social Media and Dead Trees Denizens took place at 1am in the bar of Mont Rochelle, Franschhoek, in September. I’d left my reading glasses in the restaurant next to the amaretto panna cotta with blueberries and almond, so I couldn’t even tweet it. We’d reached course seven of an eight-course culinary blowout carefully designed to showcase a dozen Italian vinos curated by Mont Rochelle GM Erwin Schnitzler, when coffee called.
My stomach is unionised and had decided that six hours of asparagus risotto with quail egg and parmesan foam, kingklip with capers and poached veal with truffled polenta plus a totally excellent Pecorino crackling required a single espresso, pronto. Adjourned to the bar, a screaming match was soon underway on the relevance of social media at events such as these. For the guest list was an explosive and unstable mixture of dead-tree media and bloggers. Alongside the usual shy scribblers from provincial newspapers and suburban knock-anddrops (from suburbs you didn’t know existed) were exotic electrons from websites with evocative names like Expectorate! and whatwedranklastnightandnowwishedwehadnt. com. Would future Franschhoek Revolutions be tweeted?
A topic Afro-headed social pundit Malcolm Gladwell raised in the columns of The New Yorker in October. His feature ‘Small change: why the revolution will not be tweeted’ makes the rather obvious point that the ‘60s civil rights struggle in the USA “happened without email, texting, Facebook or Twitter”. Obviously, as Martin Luther King had no Nokia, duh! But Gladwell does make the valid points that social media works in situations with loose connections between participants (like wine tastings) and paradigms where networks rather than hierarchies are in situ. Think Red Brigade Italian terrorists, trending in the ‘80s or Al Qaeda, now.
With problematic relations with some branches of local dead-tree media, Wines of South Africa had signed up bibulous bloggers and socialites to rate tasting rooms for the Great Wine Capitals of the World initiative. One rainy winter Saturday was enlivened by a hilarious stream of tweets from bloggers concussed as WOSA’s Stig drove over Neethlingshof speed bumps… at speed. Requests for directions after the magic bus got lost in the grounds of Waterford and for medical assistance after Harry broke a tooth during lunch at Guardian Peak. Probably not what the organisers wanted, but then as was blogged at the time, “The man from WOSA turns up to stiffen our morale. He has lunch with us. He leaves. The food is disappointing.” The limit of 140 characters having a wonderful way of slimming down winespeak flights of fancy to essentials.
But is the baby being thrown out with the bathwater? Nicholas Carr caused a stir when he asked “Is Google making us stupid?” in Atlantic magazine two years back. Finding a fertile furrow to plough, he has now followed up his provocative feature with a book-length treatment The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way we Think, Read and Remember (Atlantic Books, 2010).
Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan noted in the ‘60s that “the medium is the message”. That technology transforms taste was clear at dinner as Jeanri-Tine van Zyl and Lauren Cohen suspended conversation with hunky Mont Rochelle winemaker Dustin Osborne to tweet about the Castello di Brolio 2006 Barone Ricasoli, although such flowery Italian names severely challenge the 140 character limit.
Carr goes one step further and takes the extreme view that the Internet changes the very way we think. Information is broken up into searchable chunks, linked together via hyperlinks. Forget about computers becoming intelligent, we’re learning how to act like apples.
