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. 🙂
Well written and good insights. I’ve seen a lot of the “try Twitter for a few days and then write it off” that you talk about with the “learn German in 24 hours” analogy. For people to properly participate in the community, they need to give a little, too. That means, get a photo up on your profile, add a bio of interest, and give us a link to learn more about you and/or your company!
FYI, I’m @JeremyShapiro on twitter, and yes, I occasionally rant about misuse of Twitter – all in 140 characters or less. 🙂
“That it’s full of trivial rubbish”
Just cannot be argued. Do I choose my followings? Yes. Does it mean they regularly post worthwhile tweets? God no. In fact, Apart from a very few people I follow, I have only found a handful of people worth following.
“That’s it’s reality TV without pictures”
Not sure why you would say this is ‘bollocks’. It’s so close to Reality TV it’s frightening.
“That is for narcissists and fosters mental ill-health (WTF??)”
Now i’m just laughing – you don’t see this? Here’s a quote, read between the lines:
“It’s quite a simple equation: your opinion=bollocks.”
What you are PAINFULLY missing is that when people reference Twitter, they are not commenting on the PHP, HTML, the back-end, the Management or anything like that, it is about THEIR EXPERIENCE.
“To blame Twitter for muppets obsessed with celebrity is like blaming Excel for tax fraud”
Unbelievable, you have NO IDEA about our species.
I wonder if anyone has looked at breakdown of Republicans v. Democrats (filter on U.S.) on Twitter. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to percentage?
When replying to a man who thinks he can discredit an eminent physiologist simply by calling him an “idiot” and a “luddite,” I feel it necessary to take a leaf out of your own book. You, Mr. Lawson, are an idiot.
Name-calling is no way to get your ill-thought-out ideas across.
Like to Twitter – not sure? Facinated by the potential yes. Interesting to note that facebook got all tweeted up too. Never got facebook, too invasive for me. Prefer the edited twitter version. Not holding back, but like to think that my husand is the only one that really knows me.
Stu,
Did you read the post? If the people you follow don’t write anything worthwhile, unfollow them. If you’ve only found a handful of people worth following, I think you’ve solved your problem, just follow them.
Not quite sure how Twitter is close to reality TV.
It may be full of worthless crap, but that’s your choice to follow it, not mine.
.
this is the best thing I have read about twitter to date.
twitter is _____
twitter is not ______
the state of twitter, in my opinion:
those who don’t define.
those who do defend.
Ha! Your post is great!
As for the guy who says all of us in the Tweeting universe are lacking in identities, he might benefit from an exploration of the concept of a POI – or, a personal online identity. There are, of course, going to be many differences/similarities between it and our corporeal identities. But it needn’t imply a lack of one.
Thanks again for the entertaining and introspective post!
OK, I read all that but I’m still looking for the reasoned argument. Arrogance and swearing doesn’t exactly cut it.
What’s your species, Stu?
‘Stu’ (I normally block negative comments from anonymous commenters, but I’ll make an exception – would be nice to have a link for reference in future…)
Your experience is a VERY long way from mine, and clearly from those who’ve commented on here. The crux of the issue with most of the newspaper commenters is exactly that it ISN’T their experience. They have no experience. Just dispassionate observance of something they don’t understand.
As for ‘our species’ – the idea that facilitating conversation forces people into hitherto untapped depths of banality is nonsense. Twitter is a conversation platform. If the culture of twitter imposed upon the format by the people YOU choose to follow is trivial and banal, you’ve only yourself to blame for following them.
My overwhelming experience has been that the format has fostered conversation, encouragement, generosity, humour and support. I’ve learned a lot, gained a lot, met some great people, and got to know a load of people I’d already met better. I can’t say that for reality TV. 😉
Cameron – the eminence or otherwise of Oliver James’ credentials are deeply undermined by his utter stupidity and lack of research method in investigating Twitter in order to make his pronouncement. He may or may not be great on other matters. On this one, his professional opinion is idiotic. Ergo, in this context, the man is an idiot. It’s not just that his experience differs from mine, it’s that he’s making pronouncements about the nature of the personalities of the kind of people that use the service without any thought given to the breadth of the usage of the platform, without any research, without any qualification… All the quotes I’ve read from him on the subject of twitter are total balls. He should be embarrassed.
Foo Bear – I’m sorry you don’t like the language I use. It’s part of me expressing my annoyance at the appalling journalism and ‘science’ of the articles about twitter and Oliver James’ nonsensical pronouncements. Feel free not to read any more. I do use grown up words a fair bit.
As for reasoned argument. I’m not sure how much further I could have broken down the points they made and the ways I disagreed with them… You might not agree with my reasoning, but it seems tough to argue they aren’t reasoned…
I didn’t get Twitter until I started doing it for work related stuff, and when I started out what I wrote about was links to blog posts and so forth.
Then people started following me, I started following them, I started following their followers, etc. etc. I started to enjoy Twittering.
In fact, I went in the space of a month or so from “not getting the point of Twitter” to having one work account, and TWO personal twitter accounts.
People are impatient and to some degree this is human nature and to some degree it has been nurtured and fostered by the immediacy of the web. You go online, you google hamster videos, seconds later you are watching hamster videos.
Why people are having a hard time with Twitter is that it isn’t immediate. At first. You have to build up your audience, you have to find friends, and to do this you have to comment, you have to interact, you have to engage.
And all of that takes time. Time which people have grown unaccustomed to wanting to wait around to have pass. And while you’re waiting for it to pass, it seems like you’re only having a conversation with yourself. Hence, the false idea that this is some kind of narcissistic ego trip. But Twitter is no more egotistic and self-serving than any conversation by any person. Egotistical people will probably have egotistical tweets.
Oh, boy this is quite the hot topic.
Steve, you’ve done it again. You go on with your bad self.
As for my own opinion, I’ve lived within 60 miles of NYC my whole life. Twitter has enabled me to connect on a very personal and/or professional level with people all around the world – in a way that no other online activity ever has. And the best part is that the way Twitter is built, there’s NO ROOM for advertising. Many comments above ring true – you’re not always gonna be interested in everything everyone you follow has to say, but when are you in real life?
As I said Mr. L. – you go on w/ your bad self.
(For the record, I only very slightly agree that we could have done without the cuss words – but only slightly. After all, it’s just language.)
Peace! 🙂
thanks Neil! It’s been great seeing how your music has found a whole new international audience via Twitter – it’s the kind of music that wouldn’t necessarily be understood in a 30 second glance on Myspace, but when people get to read what you’re up to and dig deeper, lots of us have been blown away by the quality and amazingness of what you’re doing!
Re: language – I tend to write how I talk, and I definitely write for grown-ups. I’m sure there are a few people who wouldn’t usually talk like that, and I guess there are people who’ll read this that I wouldn’t talk to like that either… but I definitely wasn’t expecting to have 3.5K people read it either 🙂
Looking forward to listening to you play again soon, sir!
Love it!
You hit the mark on so many points and did it with great humour. I am sooooo stealing some of your lines mate!
Well done and thanks for the Tuesday morning giggle.
Mike Arthur – the thing is, everyone is mostly boring and narcissistic on Twitter, IF you view their outpourings dispassionately. It’s the nature of the beast, when a website asks “what are you doing?”
The difference for (I’d guess) most people is that they’re reading their friends’ Twitter feeds. Those run-of-the-mill descriptions of everyday life have extra resonance when the person writing is someone you’ve been out drinking with, worked with, gone on holiday with.
With celebrities, we just don’t have that resonance; we only know them through their public work, so when they write something trivial and normal, it might as well be any old stranger from three streets away. And of course, we don’t employ celebrities to be just like the bloke from three streets away… they’re supposed to be larger than life and entertaining.
I guess you could call me a “good example of how twitter can connect you with people from around the world that you didn’t realize you were already friends with” or something like that. 3.5k -! Amazing how many comments.
As usual, thanks for the kind words. Looking forward to hearing you as well, and when we meet. Only a matter of time, I expect. 🙂
I find that many of the folk who dismiss Twitter are the narcissistic ones to begin with. They are the ones who are only interested in their opinion and can’t see the value in exchange or real social platforms with a more even playing field.