This segment’s one of mine, and boy, is it the gentlest satire of social media that I can imagine today. Oh, for the days when I heard the word “Twitter” and thought “Well, this sounds nice and all but it’s a bit shallow; how much of it is just describing what you’re eating today?” instead of “A REPOSITORY FOR ALL THAT IS VILE UPON THIS EARTH and occasionally a few clever folks workshopping their comedy bits, eh, I’ll just check David Willis’ account, he usually retweets anything I’d want to see.”

(Talking about your lunch is more of an Instagram thing now, anyway.)

At least we’ve mostly outgrown the days where social media mavens would urge their followers to “please retweet,” though you still get lots of “remember to like and share” on Facebook. Um, remember to like and share Guilded Age!

Best’s “tweetsong” is in black-on-blue because this vaguely suggests how we saw some tweets in 2009: they were inserted into traditional websites, typed in Verdana and placed in a “badge” that could be any color. To make it extra suggestive of Twitter, Phil opted for a pale blue somewhat close to the website’s default palette.