Tantric
Once again, it's sounding like everything (the new manager and two very well documented targeted players) are done and dusted and that Spurs are waiting on their pre-arranged pencilled-in date to make it all public due to contractual obligations/new Spurs shirt/insert your own conspiracy theory here.
Every thing is set and Spurs are holding back, much like you would do with a beautiful woman. Hold back as much and as long as possible because the climax will be spine-tingling. Why finish up quickly? Tease and dictate and then detonate. What would Sting do? Then again, to be fair, following Spurs is less missionary and more Sadomasochism. But we don't complain. I don't complain. I never complain. I sometimes beg. We still talking about football?
As for all the rhetoric and conjecture? Most of it, especially anything relating to transfers and rumours, and the resulting ideology behind it resonates from one place.
Social media.
Long gone are the days when you only had a conversation at the pub before and after the game or at school/college/work on a Monday morning. Teletext Clubcall adverts whilst waiting for page two of the latest scores to appear. Not forgetting the original Titans of ITK and attention seeking, the tabloid back pages (especially on a Sunday). The latter dethroned by the Gods of the modern grapevines. All consuming knowledge with us royally drunk on consumption. It's like the Matrix with one hundred thousand Oracles sitting on a park bench. The rest are made up of Keanu Reeves, thousands of them, with sharp tongues running around a lot and kicking. Harry Redknapp will probably claim he had something to do with that.
Every thought is instantaneously shared. Which could quite easily be the outstanding reason to avoid social media altogether. Every piece of commentary, action, incident, goal, sound-bite is micro-analysed and dissected. Before you can blink there are memes, animated gifs, appreciation threads and usually plenty of obsessive 'let me get there first' shouting to claim fifteen seconds of notoriety before it fades into the next million repeats. Once upon a time, real life gave us mad jokes and iconic moments of our lives and now you spend your time talking about something 'epic' on the internet that happened on the internet.
There is no time for pausing.
At the best of times there is a lack of any true understanding of irony or sarcasm unless it comes accompanied with previous nods to comedy via caveat. Everyone is a critic and nobody can take criticism whilst some like to dish it out and block you before you can respond. Back pages of the tabloids? When was the last time anyone ever used the back page of a tabloid as the catalyst for major discussion? They only mirror what was said 24 hours earlier on someone's time-line. Tomorrow's news is what its always been, thoughtful commentary on what occurred a day earlier. Unless it's been made up to fuel the next day's hellmouth of debate online. Social media is today's news now and is mostly driven by our own desire to drown out other people's ego's with less thoughtful commentary.
It might look messy, it is messy, it's usually full of Messi. There's no denying it. If you follow the right amount of people, a mixture of fellow supporters, journalists, writers you'll have yourself a scenic majestic volcano of pulsating lava. Just don't stand too close or you'll burn. It's alive, constantly breathing out (hot air, lol). A glorified frenzied chat room with message board qualities. A community I guess. You can even meet people off Twitter and go down the pub with them. It's usually an anti-climax that. Mainly because at the best of times I can only muster two sentences worth of speak at any given time. Which ironically works out to about 140 characters.
But still, what would we do without it?
Possibly spend more time outside for a start. Conversing with the missus on the latest Eastenders story arc (Derek Branning and his Spurs robe? I reckon he was a Shelf Sider myself, pwoper norty) or perhaps allowing my daughter the luxury of an occasional walkabout when unlocking the airing cupboard for her twenty minutes of light. So much joy to behold, yet all lost whilst with me firmly seated in front of a pc/lap top/smart phone. Forever refreshing, desperate for that one last tweet before logging off. But oh no, I just thought of something really witty, I have to log on again. Oh ffs, my wi-fi is playing up, no dinner will have to wait a second, I've got something to share and God darn it the Internet has to know!
Placing the vanity driven Instagramed photos of people's dinner aside and a variety of other chat and forum-like discussions (usually arguments) I honestly can't think of a better medium than Twitter for information sharing. Like a beautiful wild fire that destroys but its flames mesmerise all that stare upon it. Yeah sure, you have to work your way through some of the smoke but I never feel like it's a wasted journey. Not just referring to transfer gossip here. But the amount of exquisitely crafted writing to be had is just fantastic. Not just fellow Tottenham bloggers, but across the board from all over the planet. It's a rich resource. It can also bring people together (oh cringe mate cringe). Sat online one late evening last year, the idea to finally record a podcast was birthed with a drunken exchange online with a like-minded individual. Some would say we've never been sober since.
My dinner. Because to understand me you need to understand what I eat.
We've all been discussing the imminent managerial appointment of Villas-Boas for weeks now, so much so that the definition of imminent is about to change to 'an event that is predicted to occur within a one hundred year period'. The signings of Vertonghen and Sigurdsson have also been well documented. The cull of Bond and Jordan, I thought had already been confirmed weeks back but only appeared to make the official site and the newspapers the other day. No word on Allen, I guess he survived.
Social media is making most news outlets fairly redundant for breaking news. They play catch-up or just repeat/rehash old news. One source copying from another and so on. News outlets end up reporting on something that might have originated from a genuine source or a dubious one yet by the time it's published nobody cares. Ouroboros.
Many take every word to be literal and yet in the next sentence argue against its legitimacy. Such is the luncay that it allows for the transparency of agendas to be made very obvious and in a positive way. This gives the power back to the people that in the past mostly did the reading and had no way to knock heads together (Teletext with a chat room would have been laugh a minute).
I'm simplifying things I know. Many journalists tweet a slice of news then write an article if relevant which is published online and then printed the next day. Others just go to print the next day based on something they've read online. Whilst Twitter itself is constantly regurgitating everything whether it's online or in print or on tv, forever feeding its over-populated nest. And somewhere Jim White strokes a white cat. So come this weekend or as much touted, the 1st of July, just pretend to be surprised/excited when we finally welcome the new THFC manager with a signing or two standing alongside him. We are the generation guilty of having far too much time on our hands and constantly wanting to know everything yesterday. Yet in amongst it exists diversity and originality. You just have to fight your way through to find it. Like so much in life, it's unnecessary and yet essential. Damned be the paradox.
There was an X-Files episode where someone ends up uploading their concious to the internet. I reckon most of us are already plugged in beyond escape. But you can get away from it every so often. The pub is never going to disappear. But guaranteed whilst you're enjoying your pint the bloke next to you will be photographing his and uploading it to share to his followers with the tag-line "I'm in the pub! Have we signed anyone yet?"
Follow me on Twitter.
/\
I'm not being ironic there, seriously, follow me.
