An argument with a friend about Twitter.
I have had many a discussion with friends about Twitter and its usefulness vs. uselessness.
I went to do see a panel in early June called “The Future of Media” that included Nick Denton of Gawker Media, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bonnie Fuller of Bonnie Fuller Media, Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray, and Craigslist founder Craig Newark. All of them were talking about what a huge deal Twitter was becoming and would continue to be, what a powerful tool it is, etc. I wrote a blog about this talk, which inspired a 25+ message exchange on Facebook about the Twitter phenomenon between myself and a friend from undergrad who was in my Film and Media Studies program with me.
So the following is from said friend on my Facebook in response to my status update that said “The Future of the Media is, apparently, all about Twitter” and then linked to my blog on the topic. Please note that I’ve changed all of the places where he’s decided to use an offensive term for Twitter (take away the “i” and replace it with an “a”) with a more PG version of the term:
Must everything be shortened to one sentence in order to be consumed in milliseconds? I don’t see the purpose of this site other than to give one sentence, and therefore poor, recaps of other stories from other sources…Self-indulgence is still very much a part of the [Twitter] universe it’s just now you can get some news updates I guess while you’re being self-indulgent. They can slap some polish on the turd but I’m still not impressed. I think it’s a horrible symptom of a larger disease that is the breakdown of our communication masked as the evolution of our communication. Dumb down everything. Reduce everything to a headline or a soundbite. One sentence is all we need. The phone call has already been replaced with the text. We’ve sacrificed in-depth analysis with the one-sentence [tweet] and people think it’s great because it’s easily accessible.
While I think some of what he says has validity, he has obviously not spent much time exploring the site or taking advantage of the @replies functionality or the search engine, which causes him to think it’s “largely the narcissistic updates every 5 minutes of the minutiae going on in people’s lives” as well as just being “a poor man’s Google News”.
I think that writers using Twitter is a way of journalism adjusting to the way that their information is presented to the public and is in no way destroying communication. If anything, it is opening up new, different avenues of connectivity.
What do you all think? I have started going to several new sites to obtain my news that I never looked at before because of Twitter and think of it as a very useful tool…but then again, I am a student of media and tend to be on the more accepting side of the “our world is changing” coin. I have also heard from all of my job-seeking friends that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a job as a writer or a PR individual if you aren’t an active tweeter.
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July 29th, 2009 at 8:37 am
I think you are right in saying that Twiiter is a way of journalism adjusting to the way that their infomration is presented. I like to think of Twitter as the “headline” of the future. However, it is easy to see how twitter can be misunderstood, because it is very easy to use it in way that seems unimportant and irrelevant.
If you are using twitter to gather information from unlikely sources, learn about new things and new people than you are making the most of your twitter experience. If you are updating about your trips to the restroom or something like that–then yes, I understand why you would think it was useless.
July 29th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
I’ve had the same (heated) discussions with people about the ‘usefulness’ of Twitter. That’s originally why I wrote this post: “Why Twitter?”
I think that you’re right – that it’s really about adjusting to an emergent form of journalism – and when paradigms shift, as old school journalism shifts to newer schools of thought, some people may steadfastly resist the change. I wonder too, if Katharine’s friend on Facebook responded with such angry dismissiveness because of that. Change isn’t always easy. Just look at some hard facts though – how can he ignore the fact that much of today’s breaking news comes through Twitter these days?
Another more subtle experience is what Clive Thompson calls “ambient awareness” in an article on Twitter in the NYTimes:
“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like a type of E.S.P.’…an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.”
and in another earlier article for Wired, I like how he sums up the aggregate effect:
“The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading…”