How Do They Do It?
I am consistently amazed at how much laughingly free publicity Twitter gets.
I think the media finally has found a “phenomenon” that they can ride into popularity rather than trailing behind. The media started pushing blogs in earnest pretty much after the industry had already grown and consolidated under LiveJournal, Blogger, and the others. YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook were all approached with the characteristic forehead-slapping “how did that quadrillion person trend get there?” look that forced Fox News to air one YouTube video per hour in an attempt to weave grassroots media into the steaming machinery of mass distribution.
As far as Twitter goes for me, I don’t even care where I am most times when I have the capacity to update a web app regarding my status. And, as I’m sure readers here can attest, I can’t yell “Fire” in less than 160 characters, let alone communicate my deepest personal feelings and conditions.
Is Twitter the “poor man’s e-mail” Google says it is? Not at all. In fact, that careless comment betrays the same sort of arrogant misidentification of value that Slashdot showed the iPod.
But it is in a way the “lonely man’s e-mail,” an expressive tool for those who can’t aim the gun barrel of their intellect at a specific target, and — more importantly — at a specific context. Twitter is interesting to people by my reckoning because of its essential lack of context: is it for updates regarding the fiber content of my diet? Is it a mouthpiece for me to provide musings on philosophy? Should I announce my investment decisions?
Twitter is communication that actively eschews the Subject, the Title, the Section, and to some extent the To Field. The “@” notation has only recently been adopted, and from what I have seen it was a reluctant change; replying to someone is about as high-context as it gets.
We’re killing grammar on the web. In fact, let’s just go ahead and say web grammar is an oxymoron. The two-thumbed primordial SMS has its excuses, but the near convention of unconventionality betrays more death to context. We increasingly talk to walls, meaning not so much that we don’t expect a reply but that we care less and less how our message is received. Speed becomes the factor: why wordsmith this when I can get two messages out in the same time?
Well, quantity is taking over quality, and our communication is increasingly designed to be easy to ignore.
Who cares if I ignore a “tweet?” Who’s even checking, and who is expecting a reply? To quote my favorite poem, you simply spit nails into an abyss and listen.
By the way, the above “paragraph” is 158 characters long.