Markus Stocker bio photo

Markus Stocker

Between information technology and environmental science with a flair for economics, the clarinet, and the world of soups and salads.

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Sunday I was back from three days without computer and any type of connectivity. Unusual circumstances, nowadays. I spent the days in a Finnish summer cottage that is built on top of a little rocky hill with a fabulous view on the Baltic sea located a good 30 minutes drive from the closest town where a shower follows a smoke sauna that is wood-heated in the morning and retains its heat well into the early hours of the next day using water held in a bucket and kept warm by the sauna. The cottage is actually an ensemble of tiny, cozy, painted red, one room wood lodges. This time of the year you get to see a sunset on the Baltic sea horizon around midnight and a sunrise just a few hours later, a few thumbs to the right along the horizon. The sun briefly dives to shortly begin again its daily long cycle in the skies. Almost surreal.

Sunday evening I was home with the feeling a friend and I long ago termed The Bubble of being light that you could lie inside a levitating bubble. I read through my inbox which reliably displays upon click. The better part of its content was clicked to trash, unread. I read through Twitter when, suddenly, I recalled a recent tweet by @kendall telling “Twitter is not the world.

I suppose, there are a number of possible interpretations for the tweet, a characteristic that is, incidentally, of many tweets. Literally, for instance, take the world as you and I know it – trees, birds, mountains, summer cottages – and Twitter and you conclude “Twitter is not the world,” obviously. Figuratively, you may interpret it as “there is more to the world than Twitter.”

From within The Bubble, the lists of messages pushed up the screen looked not much afar an expression of collective madness. I outright corrected my thinking. After all, chances are that it is not the twitters out there who use Twitter in ever more creative ways to be mad but rather me suggesting they are. With the words of Michael Allingham [1] choice “cannot, by itself, be irrational.” He writes, “reasonableness is a property of patterns of choices, not of individual choices.” There is nothing irrational in choosing to tweet but the choice would look odd if someone also chooses, for instance, to avoid Twitter.

[1] Michael Allingham. Choice Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2002.