New Gadgets and Gizmos

Geeks everywhere are going giddy! A Twitter-based marriage proposal has made the rounds.

Old-school personalities would probably frown on this. After all, shouldn’t there be a bended knee, with a risk of total humiliation for the sake of getting someone to live with and love you for the rest of your life? Here’s something else I’ve considered: if I proposed to a girl over Twitter, and a few years down the road, Twitter closes down, wouldn’t I lose a record of what’s obviously an important event in my life?

Yes, the conservative side of my personality rails against so-called novel approaches to romance and life in general. After all, I’d really want to do something like a marriage proposal in person. But the writer who maintains this blog is open to another possibility: the tools we use to capture significant moments in our life are just changing. So are the people who use them.

In other words, we will probably see more Twitter proposals in the future because micro-blogging represents a new way of doing things, of socialization. To the point that some consider them weighty enough for the stuff that really matters. An obvious example is the woman who accepted the proposal—with a tweet of her own.

On top of that, if you really think about, the old methods of recording events for posterity—photographs, video recordings, etc.—are as fragile as items within an online service’s database. Pictures can fade and be destroyed, while video encoded in older formats can break down. The same is true even if they’re digitized and stored on a computer. Just ask anyone who has suffered through a hard disk crash and failed to maintain backups.

Of course, you can argue that at least you own your photos and the like. Again, what happens to an online service like Twitter is mostly beyond our control. But what really matters about the important times in our life is our memory of them. Our collective remembrance of what happens can be more durable than even the most advanced form of storage and medium. Better yet, it can be expressed through any sort of technology, since the tools we use evolve to suit our needs.

Tags: marriage proposals, memories, online, Twitter

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