[Posted on January 17, 2008 - 2:53 PM]
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Louis Gray yesterday reprised an old, but still relevant, question about Twitter: Is it useful? Perhaps fearful of being sucked into its maw, he's resisted using the microblogging service, asserting that "outside of the occasional focused conversation, Twitter remains a noisy, ineffective tool for typical communication" and asking people to convince him otherwise. Personally, I agree. Having read Twitter a fair amount (while only tweeting once to see what it felt like), it seems like a place where a lot is said, but little is communicated. Admittedly, I might think differently if I used the service regularly. And yet as a wise man once said, namely Bill Murray in "Meatballs," it just doesn't matter. Why use Twitter? Because it's there. Unless you don't feel like it. In other words, there's no single answer to Gray's question about whether he "needs" to participate in the convo on Twitter, just as there's no consensus on the virtues, and value, of email versus instant messaging.
Speaking as a tech apostate, if not a Luddite, it seems to me the fundamental question about services like Twitter is less does it have utility (let alone commercial value) than does it satisfy a basic need? Those are hues of the same color, but they're different enough to ponder. The former has to do whether something solves a problem; the latter is at once more subjective and ambiguous, and usually more intensely felt. And the thing with basic needs is that we may not be fully conscious of them until something like Twitter comes along to tap us on the cerebral cortex and say, "Excuse me, I exist, and I'm just what you've been looking for."
In other words, deciding whether to use Twitter may say less about the merits of microblogging than about one's personal desire to take part in, or abstain from, a new genre of conversation. In considering Gray's question about whether he should use Twitter, it may also be worth recalling poet Ezra Pound's clarion call early last century to "make it new," which became the signature idea of modernism. With tech, there's something palpably exciting about using something new, because of course that's a major part of its making. And perhaps that's as good a reason as any to use Twitter. - Alain Sherter
See Jan. 16 posts from Louisgray.com: Silicon Valley Blog and Oliver Thylmann's Thoughts
Comments
From: Alain,
Fred--Makes sense. What I find interesting is that so many people seem perfectly at ease conversing in such compressed form. Guess I'm still getting used to that.
Then again, as you suggest Twitter is just one among a growing number of tools that keep the talk flowing. Twitter makes more sense to me when I think of it as one facet of a much larger electronic conversation.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Alain
Posted on:
January 17, 2008 5:31 PM
people love to talk about twitter which is great. people also love to talk on twitter which is even better. i find myself blogging a lot on twitter and i think most of it is meaningful, although some is certainly noise.
the best thing about twitter is the @replies i get. if i post a thought about the sun purchase of mysql, i'll get a few @replies from people who follow me and we'll have a conversation.
those conversations are often really enlightening.
it's hard to know everything. but it's easier to know enough people who know everything if you use tools like blogging and twitter that open up the lines of communication
fred