I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message. I don’t actually see the point of limiting communication to a haiku. I find the whole effusion of communications technology bewildering. All you have to do is overhear a certain number of cell phone conversations to see that the vast majority of what people say and write to each other is totally pointless. I have an email address and I’m thinking of shutting that down. It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.No, I'm not thinking of shutting my email address down; apart from that, my thoughts exactly. For me, Twitter is pointless at best. If I wanted to express some really short idea, I could do it here, but it is rare that something useful can be said in 160 characters or less. No wonder the service is so popular.
(Pointer)
6 comments:
All you have to do is overhear a certain number of cell phone conversations to see that the vast majority of what people say and write to each other is totally pointless. I have an email address and I’m thinking of shutting that down. It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.
That's a rather depressing view of humanity. It's also faintly elitist, as if he wonders why all the commoners have the nerve to broadcast their views in so many different ways, when it used to be just the upper echelons of society that had access to mass communication.
Maybe the reason he finds so much communication uninteresting is that he's listening in on conversations that weren't meant to be of interest to him. (I'm stealing this point from Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody.)
I do agree about Twitter, though. I have an account, but I rarely use it. I'll occasionally respond to something someone else says on Twitter, but I almost never have a spontaneous desire to express myself or inform people using Twitter. There is one great thing about it, which is that it merges so many different voices (including a lot of noteworthy people) into a single unified interface; within this interface, there's a lot of potential for unexpected but positive interactions. But the full potential of this concept is unrealized because, as you said, the character limit is far too stringent. In theory, it could be a good thing in that it encourages people to be concise, but the more common result is excessively abbreviated spellings and cryptic half-thoughts. Also, people work around it by either splitting up a single thought into multiple posts, or linking to their blog post outside of Twitter. A site shouldn't create such an intense need for people to constantly find workarounds to its limitations.
I genuinely don't get twitter - perhaps a sign of my increasing age and decrepitude but I just don't get why anyone would care about such brief and contentless thoughts - like facebook status updates really - some of the guys at work are constantly having their phones 'ping' away with new 'tweets' but I can't see the attraction.
John,
depressing it may be, but that doesn't mean it's not accurate. As for the elitist point - I'm pretty sure most people would agree that a random selection of newspaper articles is more interesting than a random selection of blogposts. However, the good thing about blogs is that in the vast universe of blogs there are going to be some that not only you like, but that deliver something you wouldn't be able to find in classical media. So, just like the quality of TV, the quality of the average blogpost or tweet need not really concern one - if you don't like it, look somewhere else. (However, you might disagree if you think there are large net negative externalities.)
Good point about who's the addressee of communication, but I don't think it explains away all of the observation. One reason we get relatively little impoverishing communication directed at us (from people not acting as representatives of companies, which is a different topic) is that we avoid those people - they don't become our friends.
All in all, though, it's no contradiction to say that most communication gets on your nerves (a question of personal preference) and that the technical innovations that make communication easier are a good thing.
pj,
I'd never heard that you can have your phone pinging away with tweets, though now that you mention it it doesn't surprise me it's technically possible and some people would want that. Sounds like hell to me, but each one his bit.
As someone who works in the field, how long do you think it will take before a researcher declares this a mental health problem - something along the lines of "real-time electronic communication addiction" - complete with diagnostic criteria and prevalence estimates?
Good points.
It won't be addiction, it'll be some claim that it causes loss of focused attention and a form of cognitive impairment.
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