What would we blog, baby, without Twitter? (Sha-la-la-la…)

A lot of you kids are probably too young to remember this, but there was a time just a few years ago when social networks like Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist. If you wanted to share your opinions on the web back then, you had to get yourself a blog.

I had a blog back in those days, and my sense of what counted as decent content was much, much broader than it is now. In the age of social media, if I want to share a quick link or a flippant remark, I can just tweet it or update my Facebook status. But back then, my blog was the only outlet I had for these little bits of information, no matter how trivial they might have been.

Just the other day, for example, I was thinking about Spin City, the sitcom that brought Family Ties star Michael J. Fox back to TV in the mid-nineties. Fox announced that he had Parkinson’s disease about three seasons into the show, and he chose to leave the series in 2000 after his symptoms had worsened. His character, Mike Flaherty, was written out and replaced with Charlie Crawford, played by the troubled and terrible Charlie Sheen.

There was a time, in other words, when a tumultuous scumbag like Charlie Sheen was considered an ample substitute for an actor, activist and Canadian icon of Michael J. Fox’s calibre. The ratings disproved this idea, of course, and Spin City was cancelled in 2002. Isn’t that nuts, though?

Now that we’ve all got Twitter, I can ask the Internet how nuts that is in a matter of seconds. I can tweet a link to the Spin City entry on Wikipedia, along with something like “I can’t believe Charlie Sheen was once considered an ample substitute for Michael J. Fox,” and then I can get on with my day without even having to touch my blog.

Come to think of it, that’s probably what I should have done, right?

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