It’s a while since I blogged anything about Twitter, so maybe it’s time for a response to a couple of the prevailing misconceptions about the micro-blogging service that has substantially improved my life over the last year.
There are three broad themes coming out in the Twitter critique:
- That it’s full of trivial rubbish
- That’s it’s reality TV without pictures
- That is for narcissists and fosters mental ill-health (WTF??)
To which I, not surprisingly, say ‘Bollocks’.
Let’s start with the bigger question of how anyone could come to that conclusion. What is twitter. It’s two things:
- You post your own messages (which can be stand-alone thoughts, or replies to things people have said)
- You read the messages of people you CHOOSE to follow.
No-one can force you to read anything. They can’t spam you like email (even the direct messages on twitter are blocked if you’re not following the person trying to message you), and you can “unfollow” someone just as easily as you “followed” them in the first place.
So how does one make a meaningful assessment of the value of that kind of simple yet broad approach to online communication? By trying it. As Blur said, There’s No Other Way.
So here’s mistake #1 made by almost everyone who’s been commenting on Twitter in the press (or posting nonsense comments about it on facebook)
- Social Media in general and Twitter specifically, are practitioner spaces first and foremost.
Some things work great from a theorist’s angle. Things for which there are solid metric data available that corollate in anyway to ‘value’. Economics is a good theorist space. Genetics isn’t a bad one. Social media is a bloody awful one. Why?
- Because twitter is fundamentally about conversations.
And conversation is not an art that can be ‘learnt’ in a day by dispassionately observing other people do it. If you suddenly change the parameters for conversation, it takes a while to adjust.
Commenting on twitter without having used it for at least a month is like dismissing German as a ‘shit language’ after trying it for a 24 hours. “So, this morning I got up, I asked some people for some good German words to use, but all I got were swearwords and ways to ask for beer. OK, so I asked a bunch of drunken German football fans in London, but it still means that the language is officially shit.”
On Twitter, You choose who to follow, you choose whether to start – or continue – the discussions about things that interest you, and you have to take the time to think about how you’re going to get your point across in 140 characters. So, if it’s full of trivial rubbish, it just means you’re following the wrong people, or are yourself failing to inspire anyone to write anything meaningful.
The flip side of this is of course that much of what makes life interesting and fun is the trivial stuff. What are the top 5 things you remember about being at work last week? Chances are most of them aren’t related to the ‘big’ stuff of your job, but are more to do with the connections you have with the people you work with. Why?
- Trivia is the context that fosters the big stuff.
People who do nothing but talk about big ideas and big concepts can get pretty dull. Sometimes you really do want to know what their favourite record to dance to is.
So, trivia is good, and it paves the way for the deeper more meaningful stuff by providing context.
The “Reality TV” argument is really fucking lazy. So, Twitter got famous in the UK because of Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. Ergo, twitter is all about watching celebs, right?
So people who talk are racists, because racists can talk? Anyone who wears clothes thinks they’re a super hero, because super-hero costumes are clothes? Clearly not. It’s all about conduits and content.
A basic understanding of Venn diagrams puts pay to that. Here’s diagram 1:
The point of this is to show how most of what goes on on twitter has no effect on me. I don’t see it, it doesn’t see me. The celebrity bit of twitter is a fairly pointless sideshow within the grand scheme of things. That there are people who spend all day trying to get an answer from Jonathan Ross or Stephen Fry says more about them than it does about twitter. It’s the same people who hang round outside film premiers. And they don’t reflect badly on cinema as an art form.
As it happens, the celebrities/famous people who do ‘get it’ are in-fact using twitter to enable direct, self-filtered communication with their audience in a way that has previously not been at all possible. The dynamic of Twitter means that the kind of ‘trolling’ behaviour that makes most web forums unusable just doesn’t work there. Precisely because your tweets are only read by those who are following you, and those who choose to click on a reply to you from someone they are following. There is no ‘unrequested push’ broadcast possibility – even if someone sends me an ‘@’ reply that I don’t like, I can block them in 2 clicks… It’s an entirely permissions-based system. So if you want to get a comment out of Dave Gorman or Will Carling or Demi Moore, you’ll have to engage them the way you would anyone else. Celeb obsessives notwithstanding, Twitter is a great leveler.
So when some media berk says ‘Twitter is just reality TV without the pictures’ I say ‘bollocks’. It’s quite a simple equation: your opinion=bollocks. (And I’d happily debate the merits of twitter with Rachel Sylvester, or Oliver James, ‘psychologist’ and professor of fuckwittage at MissThePoint university.)
Anyway, back to the diagrams. To blame Twitter for muppets obsessed with celebrity is like blaming Excel for tax fraud – it’s not the spreadsheet that’s faulty, it’s the data. And you’re in control of the data-set.
Anyway, the third point – I’ve already mentioned that Psychologist Oliver James was quoted in the Times article as saying,
“Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.â€
Which is about the most embarrassing load of balls I’ve ever heard anyone come out with. Oliver James, you sound like Tipper Gore telling America’s young that they’ll go to hell for listening to Prince. It’s equivalent to saying “no-one would ever tell their friends or colleagues what they’re up to if they had a strong sense of identity” – You, sir, are an idiot, a patronising ne’er-do-well luddite, in need of a lesson in communication. It’s amazing how ’eminent professionals’ can miss the point so spectacularly, while so many people are finding their lives enriched, their friendships deepened, their business networks widened and better connected by just chatting!
Furthermore, I think the opposite is true – if you’re the kind of incommunicative academic-to-the-point-of-being-incoherent buffoon who thinks Twitter is narcissistic, I’d say YOU most definitely have a problem with your sense of identity. Either that, of you’re so utterly self-obsessed, that you just don’t have any friends you’re interested in. Either way, I’d rather be where I am than where you are.
Twitter – and the raft of ‘micro-blogging’ services that are springing up, and will continue to mutate – is changing the way we communicate online, and we’re all the better for it. It’s not going to disappear, and 3 years from now, we’ll all have a twitter name (or hopefully an OpenID-authenticated cross-platform equivalent) the way we have an email address.
So, Twitter-people, how has Twitter helped you? Stories please. 🙂
Twitter’s helped me in so many ways, it’s helped me make new friends with similar interests, I’ve got involved in video sites which in turn has helped me reduce my fear of giving presentations and talking in public, it’s given me an opportunity to bore more people than I can count with my holiday countdowns and general drivel and it’s helped me to learn to be concise….140 characters can say an awful lot if you put some thought in to it!!
Everyone – thanks! So great to get lots of feedback. Much appreciated! (this post has the highest day’s traffic I’ve ever had, and it’s only lunchtime 🙂
Lovely Terence – very good points, sir – I think my last sentence is leaning in that direction – there’s LOADS of great ways to develop and nuance the micro-blogging experience. As with pretty much everything online, it’s all about the filters. But the blunt filters that are there, and the size limitation make it pretty easy to manage. It’d be a fairly small operation to unfollow someone during the world cup who was tweeting football, but to set a calendar alarm to remind you to refollow when the tournament finished… Would be great to have tools to do that, to remove keywords…
But we’re in such early days, and the benefits of it NOW are so great, that it just makes me excited for the future of the whole idea.
…I’m just sorry that my diagram isn’t as cool as the ones you had at MoMoLo 🙂
I find the biggest thing to learn with Twitter is that just because people are interesting in real life doesn’t mean they will by interesting on Twitter or vice-versa.
Personally I find all celebrities I’ve followed (including our beloved Stephen Fry) to have incredibly boring, narcissistic Twitter streams. Perhaps that’s why the journalists think the same, they go after seeing what the “big names” use Twitter for which, as Steve so aptly pointed out, is usually self-promotion rather than conversation or to learn from others.
Great post. I *love* venn diagrams as a way of explaining things – there are more here http://thisisindexed.com/
Nice post, Steve.
I agree with everything you say on the subject, but tend to simply ignore what the mainstream press (and their pundits) think Twitter is and for the same reasons I ignore their opinions on most tech and a lot of the arts.
Twitter is never going to be definable from the outside looking in. Even once you start to use it you learn early on (if you’re not too self obsessed) that there are myriad ways to use the platform and some will work excellently for you and others won’t. None of them are wrong.
The exciting thing for me about Twitter is the potential of how it’s used. Importantly it’s not the company themselves that are working this out – by answering that one simple question, ‘what are you doing?’, users are the ones at the helm.
Exciting times 🙂
Great post Steve, thanks!
It would be interesting to compare the UK Twitter experience with how people are reacting to Twitter in other countries. Hmm..There will most probably be similarities but I’m wondering what the differences might be?
Most Brits I know have Twitter feeds containing conversations with people from other countries mostly written in English – we’re lucky to have that possibility, but if you can use/speak several languages you have an extra angle on Twitter… It’s fantastic to think of the opportunities here.
When I first heard about Twitter I was wondering how it might be useful… I still am, but I’ve understood that having the conversation is quite a big step forward just in itself for it’s what you choose to do and say on Twitter that’s the important thing… It’s all up to you.
Twitter is an open page, it’s open format actively encourages new contacts compared to, say Facebook – which in my experience tends to favour fostering IRL contacts between friends/family – whereas Twitter, gives everyone a chance to exchange ideas with people they’d often never have the chance to talk to otherwise…
Wow…I mean how could that not be inspirational?….:)
I had a lot to say in response to this post so I put it in my own blog post! But generally yes, agreed, and great post 🙂
Read more here: http://joannejacobs.net/?p=877
Cheers,
jj 🙂
Well said, Mr Lawson. I fully agree. The only thing I dislike about Twitter is the amount of spam followers I seem to get but frankly they don’t @reply me and I don’t engage them so it bothers me less than it did at the start.
I like to think of those followers as riding the same train but in a different car (and often, being tossed off before I even hear from them.)
Love the post thank you.
I wrote a short piece about this kind of thing a bit ago. Responsibility in pub-sub architectures. The subscriber’s job is to decide how to filter the noise, the publisher’s job is to create noise – well not literally, but I hope the idea makes sense.
http://businessanditarchitecture.blogspot.com/2008/12/pub-sub.html
The above URL is a pointer to that set of thoughts.
This reminds me of the Joke, there are 10 people who get twitter ! Wait no thats not it.
I ranted a bit on this earlier today. People critiquing twitter are like people who rant at their TVs seemingly forgetting how they are choosing to watch and listen.
Thanks for the breakdown now to make this the required reading rather than the recommended friend shite Twitter is currently pushing.
Excellent analysis.
As to how it helps me–I’m a free lance fiction writer (a socially isolating profession if ever there was one) and I’m able to get a sense of connection with my editor, many fellow writers, and fans of my work. I’ve also received anthology invitations based on offhand tweets that just happen to resonate with an anthology’s focus.
I definitely don’t use it to “market” my work and have a tendency to unfollow people who do so.
Again, great analysis of the media idiocy going on over twitter.
I LOVE this post and your common sense take on social media in general. The thing that is sad to me is the people who most need to read this probably won’t. sigh. I’m going to post it anyway and hope they do! 😀
What brilliant insight, so well put, thanks Steve. As a fairly new Twitterer I am finding my way with who I want to follow and what to tweet. The rubbish written on this medium was enough to “make you go hmmmmmm!” I Tweet when I like, when I have time and it lets me know when friends, colleagues are going to be in a specified area and can make my day more efficient if anything and certainly more fun. I like Stephen Fry’s post’s because they make me laugh. Cheers Steve wish I could write as well as you.
Penny – then we’re quits, cos I wish I had your succinctness and presentation skillz in podcastland 🙂 really glad you liked the post. x
Great article! I’ve been struggling to define Twitter to my friends lately, and often just give up. Your points will help me tell that what it’s NOT. Any little bit helps!
Good insights. I hesitated signing up because I was concerned about the time involved but as a journalist writing about business and technology I couldn’t afford *not* to. I’ve only used it since December and in the beginning followed lots of people I thought would be interesting. The result was a noisy Twitter stream. I’ve only just started unfollowing people who I’ve come to realize don’t add anything to my use of the medium. But that’s harder said than done, which might explain why some people don’t and continue to live with the noise, then complain about it.
i use twitter because its fun! if someone is saying things that dont interest you, then dont follow them! its not rocket science! lol