In Defense of Twitter
Posted on Sunday, April 19, 2009
Relatively speaking, I’ve been using Twitter awhile now (I just looked: since April 2nd, 2008). Until just a few months ago, this meant explaining what Twitter is to people. These days, however, it usually means explaining what Twitter is not.
Here’s a typically cynical take on Twitter by Nicholas Carr, via another Twitter skeptic, Andrew Sullivan:
The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.
Or maybe it’s just fun to share your silly thoughts and to read the silly thoughts of others. I mean, it may be about narcissism and a bunch of nonsense about symbols versus reality. ((I mean, one could argue all of social interaction is “symbols speaking of symbols to other symbols,” but then you’d lose the high ground about Twitter being all that new and corrosive, right?)) Or it could just be fun. A simple extension of everyday social behavior into a new medium. But that’s so boring, right?
Now there are certainly a large number of obnoxious people on Twitter. (Of course, there’s a lot of obnoxious people in life, too.) For example, the other day I had an exchange with a friend on Twitter joking about how if you use the right buzzwords in your tweets, your follower count will shoot immediately afterwards because all the “SEO Experts” and “Internet Marketeers” will blindly follow anyone using the right buzzwords. It worked: I got an extra half-dozen obnoxious, worthless “followers” within the hour—I can be so rude because I know they won’t see this as it’s more than 140 characters into an article. But you know what, you don’t have to follow them back. Aside from the notification emails (which you can turn off), the fact that these self-described Twools (I mean, can you make up a better nickname?) are on twitter has absolutely zero impact on my use of the service. As one of my favorite Twitterers, @gruber said the other day:
The genius of Twitter: you pick who you follow, so every illiterate in the world can join (and they are) and it doesn't change your stream.
Twitter asks, “What are you doing?” The best Twitterers generally ignore this question though. I mean, sometimes what you’re doing is interesting ((And, sure, the bar for “interesting” isn’t that high, but that doesn’t mean everything has to devolve into completely pointless chatter about your favorite color or how you just got a paper cut. I’ve posted seemingly mundane things before that have surprised me by spurring conversations with friends. Is this “interesting”? Well, it was fun. Does this bother you? Unfollow.)), but Twitter is really a general-purpose messenging system: sharing interesting links, making quick observations about current events or funny social encounters, etc. It’s very good for these sorts of things: unlike IM it allows you to talk to a group of people asynchronously, and unlike email it hasn’t been claimed for serious, business use (you don’t have to read every tweet) and the 140 character limit (and the fact that it’s public) keeps this from happening.
So this is a long-winded way of saying that yes, there’s a lot of annoying people posting annoying things on Twitter. But it’s all opt-in. You can have a circle of ten people on Twitter that you interact with and it can be fun. All the crap going on around Twitter literally doesn’t affect you (other than the occasional fail whale).
So saying I’m on Twitter doesn’t mean I need to tell the whole world when I’m going to the bathroom or eating breakfast. It doesn’t mean I’m a narcissist living “only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.” It simply means I’ve found a group of people who also use Twitter who write things I enjoy reading, and that I think it’s fun to occasionally post short thoughts of my own as well. Like I said, it’s really not that unique. Just standard human social behavior funneled through a new medium. Like email or blogging now, Twitter (and micro-blogging generally) will look boring in a few years. But I bet it’ll still exist and still be very popular. There’ll be something new to freak out about by then, I’m sure.