Aug
7
Death by Tweet
The other week I gate-crashed a Social Media Club of Portland planning meeting. I hadn’t been invited, but I like to think that was an oversight. Thoroughly lovely people, although someone did insist I validate my identity via business card, as if perhaps this was rather more a debutante’s ball and rather less an administrative ritual. And then of course the inevitable question, “What’s your twitter handle? So I can follow you…”
I’ll dispense with my etymological objections straight away: ordinary people have neither handles nor followers. Tea-pots have handles, cultists have followers.
Even the term twitter is so intrinsically inane it is already satirical; it stands as a whimsical vision of what people might do in some contrived futuristic, post-capitalist society to pass the time when all other human needs have been satiated (cf. the peerless, childless city of San Francisco). Nevertheless, the insufferably smug founder Nathan Barley Jack Dorsey - tours Baghdad’s Green Zone at the behest of the State Department, iPhone held aloft as might a missionary his scripture, for in this – we are to believe – lies the salvation of democracy. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the denizens of Baghdad – no thanks to us – are working at a slightly lower plane of Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy than those surfed in the San Francisco Bay. I might even be tempted to put an inoculation or a text book ahead of a twitter short code.
On the other hand, Twitter does provide useful and virtually free ammunition in our phoney war with Iran, hence no doubt the State Department’s interest. But I digress,
At its best, Twitter is an RSS reader for the masses.
Even though RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s not rocket science, my dad’s never going to configure an RSS reader to get his news. And he has a doctorate. Setting up a twitter follow is marginally simpler, if only because twitter handles are simpler to remember and communicate verbally than URLs. Also the brevity of tweets makes following an attractive alternative to email signup for those drowning in junk email. If you choose who to follow wisely, twitter has some value.
Still, it remains primarily a medium for middle-aged marketing executives and narcissists.
“In a society supposedly saturated with media messages, information and meaning “implode,” collapsing into meaningless “noise,” pure effect without content or meaning” – Kellner on Baudrillard (1983)
Unbelievably, somebody somewhere has had the twitter fail whale tattooed to their leg.
- yup, that’s about the size of it. The twitterverse is, to me, no other thing than a tsunami of banality, the retweet being the semantic equivalent of the Boss BF-2 super feedback and distortion pedal. Much like the poor chaps at the CIA dedicated to monitoring our phone calls for indicators of sedition, the signal to noise ratio is off the scale.
Pretty much the last thing I need is more data coming at me, more sludge to sift through in the unlikely hope that there be gold in them thar hills. And sludge it is too; search.twitter.com finds me no less than 14 mentions of cornflakes in the last two hours – and it’s not even breakfast time.
Ultimately twitter beyond RSS – twitter for the masses – exists because some people like the sound of their own voice, have too much time on their hands, are resistant to concepts which require more than 140 characters to convey and are naive enough to believe that anyone else out there gives a monkey’s about what they ate for lunch. Most of them happen to be middle class and middle aged, which is of course twitter’s key demographic.
I say it’s a flash in the pan. And you can all mock me when I’m proved wrong.
Further Reading
- I Hate Twitter [blog]
- I Truly Hate Twitter [blog]
- Twouble with Twitters: SuperNews! [animation]
- Analysis: 40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble – only 40%?
- Exhibit A – Twitter CEO’s Wife Tweeting While in Labor – words fail me
