Wasting the day away. That's all that Twitter does according to the Old and Male this weekend. Unwisely, one columnist was paid to pay attention to what she was doing with Twitter over the course of a day. She came up with this astounding observation:

In the end, I followed up on 44 links between 9 a.m. and 11 p.m. In total, this equalled three hours of power reading. Considering that your standard city dweller gets crazy waiting 10 minutes for public transit, and sometimes doesn't even have time for breakfast (a meal that comes in a box ), this is a massive chunk of the day. Or, to put it in another perspective, the average American spends a mere 45 minutes a month – a month, people! – on newspaper websites.

I love the reference to "power reading" and, no, I have no idea what it means either. You are either reading or not reading. But it implies that the person has greater powers, sort of like a reading superhero. Power readers believe. The promise of Twitter is like that, too. As with Facebook, blogging and the internet as a whole. You will be more the you you really are, they say. I make you better, more you. Sadly, no one noticed that the long tail looks a lot like a rat's as far as the promise of individualization goes. The superhero twit at the end of the day, the power twit, is just the one who is now carrying around the YouTube images of a chipmunk eating 12 cookies at once in their head.

Now consider this news about exercising after a busy workday: "[t]here’s only so much willpower stored within people, and once it’s used up, it’s gone,..." I've known this all along as did my junior high teachers... and early career employers. What can the combination of limited will to go on and the devil's playground of the information super highway mean? Depends on who you are, I suppose. I have built up defenses to such things through the combination of having once dabbled in punk rock and now being a TV sports fan. These things are one's rock, one's personal foundation. With them in place, one knows both that society is all an arbitrary system controlled by interests antagonistic to your well being and also that one has infinite (in fact, magical) powers of distracted attention in relation to things which are utterly unimportant... and which you know are utterly unimportant. That last bit is key. You know what you are doing is silly because, for example, you wear sports clothing to remind you and others of your silliness. In light of such knowledge, what can stop me? Certainly not the despair that I have just lost a day gaping at Twitter links as my cardiovascular system atrophies before the glowing screen and my days on Earth slip away. Through that purposelessness and my awareness of purposelessness, I am redeemed. While wearing a Red Sox hat in my easy chair.

The real horror of the Twitter-fed cube jockey dreaming of the day that someone acknowledges they are in the presence of a power reader - or a willpower exerciser or some other such thing - is the concurrent suspicion that there is no underlying meaning to the dream. Like earnestly reading a Harry Potter novel, it's not just that you are inwardly idle as tweets or sit-ups pass your mind's eye by. It is that you are unaware that your idleness has and should have no meaning. If that is the zen of the internet or anything else, so be it. Embrace it. Only by that way is the path to superdooperness.