Twitter: Old Dog, New Tricks

Josh Colby

DTC 375

4.9.09

Instructor Jason Farman

Word Count: 967

Twitter: Old Dog, New Tricks

Let’s say you attend a technology conference and on the agenda is a session on Twitter. It might be called something like “Ambient Intimacy” or something about connectedness or awareness. Regardless, if you attended this and heard the latest craze about what has been coined as micro blogging, you might be blown away; not by the genius or newness of it, but by how strikingly mundane and trivial it all sounds. If the speaker got up and talked about how he tweets regarding when he wakes in the morning or when he makes a quick trip to the grocery for some milk, cheese and tortillas. Now, you could even be an avid Facebook or Myspace user and still find a service like Twitter that offers users the incredible opportunity to project banal details such as those listed above to be fruitless and it very well could leave you stunned by the apparent pointlessness of it all. However, if you were actually force yourself to try it with a few friends, in time you might discover what many skeptics and non skeptics alike have been discovering - Social connectedness and even intimacy. This is what makes Twitter and micro blogging in general a phenomenon. The mundane details that Twitter allows users to project among those that choose to “follow” the user actually over time begins to foster intimacy on a level not possible before among so many, and this is what makes media like Twitter “new.”

In closer examination of Twitter, it is not a breakthrough new media that pays no homage to pre-existing media. The term “micro blog” obviously gives that away seeing as how the word “blog” is in there. Twitter technically really isn’t any different from an actual blog except that it is limited to 140 characters (Mischaud, 2007, p.4). However, Clive Thomson (2008) says when writing in the New York Times that “the phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered (p.mm42).” So, while even blogging pays homage to earlier form of writing such as journaling e.g. writing in a diary and micro blogging obviously are very shortened blogs, their style is much different and than normal blogs and treated like they are something entirely different by their users.

In light of this truth, the effects of Twitter’s micro blogging within its community of users are far from mundane and actually are very fascinating to look at. Mundane little nothings become something much more as Clive Thomson points out. “This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating (2008, p. mm42).” This is where even skeptics like myself have to stop and ponder the implications of this because an effect like this over something so simple at first glance is the genius of Twitter. Putting in no more effort to use Twitter than the effort you put into a text message, over time, users can maintain a degree of intimacy with a vast number of people that would not be possible in simple face to face interaction and all the while giving a whole community of tweeters the chance to know them too.

In Twitters simplicity, people have an outlet for their need to express themselves and be heard. There are plenty that don’t even address the question that Twitter poses of “What are you doing? (Mischaud, 2007, p. 38)” In my experience on Twitter, I’ve found that people can and do say whatever they wish. In whatever way people choose to express themselves they will say it regardless of the question. Because of this, along with the knowledge that many people are hearing them, users can rest assured in that their expressions are not in vein. The mundane lives of people over time become something much more; something special. That in itself is a satisfying thought and it fosters a communal social consciousness that only at first looks like the opposite of narcissism.

So, to the many that have doubts about Twitter’s genius, I have no reason to blame you, for I was once in your shoes, and really I still have my frustrations with it as far as its capabilities. However, I think Robert Lucky of IEEE Spectrum (2009) said it best when he said that we are in the middle of something that we don’t really quite yet understand, and the full effect of rising social awareness isn’t yet fully visible to us (p. 22). The trend I found in my research of this was the term “ambient awareness” or “ambient intimacy.” This is actually happening. The many involved in social networking really are becoming much more socially conscious. As said in the beginning of this essay, this is what makes Twitter new even though it obvious remediates other media both new and old.

References

Lucky, R. W. (2009). To Twitter or Not to Twitter [Electronic version]. IEEE Spectrum, 46(1), 22. From Academic Search Complete.

Mischaud, E. (2007). Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self. (Doctoral dissertation, Media@lse, London. 2007). Retrieved April 9, 2009, http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/mediaWorkingPapers/MScDissertationSeries/Mishaud_Final.pdf

Thomson, C. (2008, September 7). Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. The New York Times, p. MM42. Retrieved April 9, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1