“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
Eleanor Roosevelt (supposedly)
Where did this piece of codology come from? Surely nobody as well-respected as Eleanor Roosevelt would have said something as dumb as this out loud?
First of all, even if you accept that what people discuss (rather than the perspicacity with which they discuss it) is an indicator of how intelligent they are, surely the order is wrong. It should be
- ideas
- people
- events
in descending order of things thick people talk about. Talking about things that happened (or are happening, or will happen) seems to me to be just above “4 – things you might like to buy” in such a list.
Second of all, discussions of both ideas and events tend to be more interesting when people are part of the discussion. Events tend to be significant, and ideas important, because of their impact on people.
But most of all, the thing that annoys me about this little quote is the idea that there is a hierarchy of importance in things people talk about. Some of the most pointless, self-indulgent conversations are often about the supposedly profound, while some of the most well-judged and significant can be small talk. As in so many other things in life, context is everything and variety matters.
In early 2009 Jay Rosen decided that he was using Twitter in a way he called “mindcasting”, which he explained as answering the questions “What are you thinking?” rather than the standard “What are you doing?”. What he was really doing was being clear about what you would get if you followed him – he would use his own network to find stories he would link to and comment on related to his area of interest.
His neologism contains two crucial concepts:
- mind
- casting (as in broad)
Subsequent discussion of his idea focused on the first part of the idea and juxtaposed it with another idea he had made up to describe what he didn’t do – “lifecasting”. Lifecasting is often described in terms of lots of people talking about what they are eating, but that is shorthand for people talking about inconsequential details of their lives that nobody else could possibly be expected to care about.
Keith McArthur explained in a blog post of the time about the value judgments usually implied when the terms mindcasting and lifecasting were used.
The thing is though, that it is not just that there are important people telling everybody about their profound thoughts and silly eejits telling everyone about their nonsense. There are not just the serious “mind” people and the trivial “life” people. As well as the people who conceive of themselves as “casters”, there are also the people who behave as though they are part of a conversation, rather than in charge of a stream of information.
Not that Jay Rosen is not using Twitter well. On the contrary, he uses it very well and quickly saw how he could best use it to his advantage and the advantage of people who followed him (of which I am an admiring one). But he is a well-known journalism professor, who is likely to have far more followers than he can follow or interact with. He is famous on Twitter and so the mathematics make it impossible for him to chew the fat online about silly and funny things that might occur to him. Being in charge of a stream of information and adding his own insights is the best he can offer.
But it does not follow that that is the best that anyone can offer, or that Twitter would be better if we all concentrated on sending out 8 tweets a day with links to our current obsession,
One of the best tweets I’ve ever read is by @Eamonn_Forde – “There is a man walking up Kingsland Road carrying a mini trampoline on his back. Like a bouncy snail.”
That’s poetry. It’s an observation on life (an “event” in the limited terms of the Eleanor Roosevelt epigraph) that could only have come from the mind of the man that made it. Pure genius.
