An argument with a friend about Twitter.
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009I 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.