Who Knew?![As more and more people whom I actually respect flock to Twitter, I’ve been forced to reevaluate my previous position on the service and struggle to come up with a possible use for it in my crazy existence. (The line of reasoning being: certainly all of these people can’t be wrong!) This is kind of a difficult thing to justify.
In 2007, Clive Thompson wrote a column in WIRED Magazine advocating Twitter as a form of “social proprioception”, a kind of sixth sense where the collective stream of short updates gives you a general knowledge of the moods and goings-on of your community of Twitter-using friends. I don’t buy the idea that this enhances or complements actual social interaction. In my limited experience with Twitter, it just makes so many conversations redundant and abbreviated: every update represents one less thing to tell the other person when you meet face-to-face.
People like Merlin Mann or Rob Huebel use the 140-character limit as an opportunity to write concise and witty one-liners. But IMO, following these people for any extended length of time is borderline obnoxious; like Bruce Sterling said in his 2007 SXSW keynote, Twitter is basically like people throwing croutons at you: it’s barely satisfying, they have little nutritional value and it’s an incredibly annoying experience. Given the frequency with which these people tweet it’s obvious that they’re just farting this shit (albeit very clever shit) out the minute they think of it without regards to quality. I keep reading about people abandoning their well-written blogs in favor of Twitter because it takes so much less effort.
Still others tout the benefits of Twitter as a news source: the first photo of the US Airways plane landing in the Hudson was posted to Twitter. But it’s hard to see the benefits of knowing something a few hours before everyone else as anything but negligible.
The most sensible use I’ve heard for Twitter is a filter: blogs sometimes have dedicated Twitter feeds to post the most important or interesting articles on their site for the day, or they post the links that didn’t make it to the blog. It’s a very utilitarian approach, as opposed to the personal microblogging that I guess I hold in disdain. And that’s what I will be doing. With the aid of Safari140 I’ll be posting links to Twitter that don’t merit a write-up on this blog: the B-roll, if you will. It’s likely that most of it will be frivolous nonsense, and if you’re a fan of this site you shouldn’t feel any compulsion to follow the Twitter feed as well. But if you’re looking for something to read or watch, I’ll be posting up additional links there.
Follow me. If you really feel the need to.
[Credit to Jordan Motzkin for essentially triggering this post.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/6Akhqq4XYku74w1tpAYJCRfto1_500.jpg)
As more and more people whom I actually respect flock to Twitter, I’ve been forced to reevaluate my previous position on the service and struggle to come up with a possible use for it in my crazy existence. (The line of reasoning being: certainly all of these people can’t be wrong!) This is kind of a difficult thing to justify.
- In 2007, Clive Thompson wrote a column in WIRED Magazine advocating Twitter as a form of “social proprioception”, a kind of sixth sense where the collective stream of short updates gives you a general knowledge of the moods and goings-on of your community of Twitter-using friends. I don’t buy the idea that this enhances or complements actual social interaction. In my limited experience with Twitter, it just makes so many conversations redundant and abbreviated: every update represents one less thing to tell the other person when you meet face-to-face.
- People like Merlin Mann or Rob Huebel use the 140-character limit as an opportunity to write concise and witty one-liners. But IMO, following these people for any extended length of time is borderline obnoxious; like Bruce Sterling said in his 2007 SXSW keynote, Twitter is basically like people throwing croutons at you: it’s barely satisfying, they have little nutritional value and it’s an incredibly annoying experience. Given the frequency with which these people tweet it’s obvious that they’re just farting this shit (albeit very clever shit) out the minute they think of it without regards to quality. I keep reading about people abandoning their well-written blogs in favor of Twitter because it takes so much less effort.
- Still others tout the benefits of Twitter as a news source: the first photo of the US Airways plane landing in the Hudson was posted to Twitter. But it’s hard to see the benefits of knowing something a few hours before everyone else as anything but negligible.
Follow me. If you really feel the need to.
[Credit to Jordan Motzkin for essentially triggering this post.]
