My recent silence is the symptom of my immersion into final papers and such. But I just happened upon an example of an apocalyptiquote worth sharing. A while back, I intended to make a regular feature of modern uses of apocalyptic language. For some reason, I haven’t happened upon many good examples, but that’s mainly because I’m so stuck in ancient uses during my studies. Here’s one that has climbed to the top of the Twitter popularity charts: the Twitpocalypse.
The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,647
For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.
So this version of the apocalypse? Twitter applications might fail. To categorize the use of this apocalyptic language, this falls under the heading of “Apocalyptic language used for something nobody should really care about.” Maybe we could say that it is somewhat “sectarian” in its inward focus: obsessive Twitter users have talked about it so much that it became the most popular topic . . . on Twitter. For the rest of us, who cares?
Maybe there’s a metaphor there to describe more religious uses of apocalyptic language?
