I had two screens going last night like some kind of political junkie NORAD operator, with the TV on the coffee table tuned to the debate feed, and my laptop open on my knees running a Twitter search for "Big Bird." That's not an exaggeration, I actually typed "Big Bird" into the search box around 9:40pm and just watched it scroll. Within maybe twenty minutes it was unreadable, just a wall of jokes going by faster than I could read them.
For anyone who missed it: at one point during the debate Romney was talking about things he'd cut from the federal budget and brought up PBS, said something like he loves Big Bird but he's not going to keep borrowing money from China to pay for it. Totally normal budget-wonk line, the kind of thing that in 2008 would have gotten a paragraph in a wire story the next morning. Instead the internet just ate it alive in real time. The parody account (@bigbird, not affiliated with Sesame Street or PBS in any official way, which is its own weird thing) was picking up new followers by the thousand before the debate had even ended. Twitter's own numbers afterward put the whole debate at something north of ten million tweets, which at the time was being called the most tweeted-about political event ever, or close to it. I don't know how they count that stuff exactly and I'm sure the methodology is fuzzy, but the scale of it was obviously real, you could feel it happening.
What I keep thinking about isn't the joke itself, which honestly wasn't even that funny by tweet number four thousand. It's how weird the whole second-screen thing has gotten in the space of like two election cycles. In 2008 I watched debates the normal way, on a couch, maybe texting a friend afterward to say "that was rough." Last night I barely watched the actual debate. I watched the debate through a keyhole made of other people's reactions to the debate, which is a genuinely different activity, and I'm not totally sure it's a better one. You end up reacting to the reaction instead of the thing. Somebody on my timeline made a joke about binders (wrong debate, I know, that's not this one, don't @ me) faster than I'd even processed what the candidate had actually said. It's a little bit like reading the recap before you've read the book.
I will say the live-tweeting thing does surface some genuinely great writers you'd never find otherwise — there was a guy, I think a sports writer normally, doing debate commentary purely in boxing metaphors, and it was better analysis than half the cable pundits managed. But it also means my feed was basically unusable for anything else for about ninety minutes. I have one friend, no names, who live-tweets not just debates but also grocery runs and traffic, and last night his output was, generously, a lot. I muted him around 9:15 and I regret nothing.
Separately, and only sort of related — I saw this morning that Facebook is saying they've crossed one billion monthly active users. One billion. That number doesn't even parse for me as a real quantity of humans, it's just an abstraction at that point, like the national debt or the number of stars anyone claims to be able to see. I signed up for Facebook back when you needed a .edu email address to get in the door, and back then it felt like a clubhouse. Now it's roughly one in seven people on the planet checking in on what their cousin's coworker had for lunch. I don't have a tidy thought about what that means, I just find the number itself sort of dizzying to sit with for a minute.
Anyway. My Kindle Paperwhite is supposedly shipping to me any day now and I keep checking the order status page like it's going to change anything about when the truck shows up. It won't. I know that. I check it anyway. That's basically the whole theme of this post if I'm honest: checking feeds compulsively and pretending it's information gathering.