A few weeks ago – as I was sprawled in front of my computer in the early hours of the morning, busily scrolling through the hundreds of RSS updates I had yet to read – I received notification that I had a new mention on Twitter. It seemed innocent enough at the time, and I complacently command-tabbed to Tweetie to see who had mentioned me in a new Tweet. Amazingly enough, this was not a reply to one of my previous messages, nor was it even from one of my followers; it was from one of my favorite bands, Bear In Heaven. It turns out my account had recently mentioned their name via the Last.fm iTunes plugin for Twitter, which automatically tweets my most-listened-to iTunes artists every week. Bear In Heaven had evidently searched for other Twitter users who had mentioned their name and, upon finding that I had listened to their songs 180 times that week, added their own two cents:
Next week try and break 200?
Not only had I just been put in contact with an artist whose work I greatly admire, I didn’t even consciously make an effort to connect with them.
This kind of interaction typifies what’s seemingly revolutionary about Twitter. Becoming somewhat of a phenomenon in recent months, no one would have guessed that a simple service which provides 140-character text-only messages aimed largely at no-one would be successful. If you’d asked me of my opinion of such a concept five years ago, I’d probably have said it sounds downright boring, if not useless. Why would I want to talk to a faceless community of strangers thirty words at a time? Haven’t we moved beyond text-only communication? Do I really want to know what my friends are eating for breakfast?
Yet here we are, at the dawn of a new decade, and Twitter continues to flourish. Yes, it’s true that Twitter provides the ability for strangers to communicate in new and exciting ways – such as Bear In Heaven encouraging me to play their music – but in reality, Twitter is driven by a far more basic human trait: narcissism. Instead of encouraging users to edit and consider their online output via the creation of long blog posts or lengthy photo-uploading processes, Twitter encourages the immediate, the basic, and the banal.
Nowhere else is this more evident than in the way which Twitter displays every new Tweet, regardless of content, with a monotonous uniformity. Nicholas Carr provides a poignant example in his Roughtype.com post Twitter Dot Dash:
my dog just piddled on the rug! :-) [less than 10 seconds ago]
Seventeen killed in Baghdad suicide bombing [2 minutes ago]
Oh my god I cant believe it I just ate 14 double stuff Oreos [3 minutes ago]
Thanks to Twitter, breaking international news is now given the same media attention as a pet’s bladder issues. Social media supposedly embraces the power of “we”, but in reality, it’s far closer to embracing the power of “I”. Every moment of every Twitterer’s life is now glorified. As Carr argues, Twitter is likely to act as a repository for those who desperately feel the need to connect with others, even if that connection is merely shouting into a digital void.
If this is the case, why does anyone actually use Twitter? Ironically, its also this lack of connection which makes Twitter’s iteration of social media so addictive. While eating dinner, I can see what sixty of my friends – real or not – are doing, what band they’ve just discovered, or how many hours they slept last night, all without saying a word. In effect, I can know all about someone without ever having talked to them. It’s a bizarre method of interaction, but one which – as evidenced by the millions of users who sign into Twitter every day – is oddly pleasurable.
While this duality of disconnection is at the heart of most of the Tweets sent every day, there have been a few glimmers of promise amongst the noise. The recent protests in Iran proved the service invaluable; when government censors prevent traditional news media from functioning effectively, Twitter’s sprawling network became a lifeline to those in need of information. Just the other day, I was notified of a tornado warning in the Los Angeles area by one of my followers, an alert which I likely wouldn’t have received otherwise. Bear In Heaven’s rather unexpected reply was an uplifting encounter between artist and fan, both of whom had never – and likely will never – meet in person.
Above all, Twitter has the power to surprise. No one would have guessed such a service would create the landslide of public interest garnered in the past few months, let alone become a useful news-media tool for those around the world. While it’s true there’s a lot of garbage on Twitter, its real promise lies in its open-endedness; most likely, its current uses have only scratched the surface of its real power. Likely, it will continue to change the world in even more surprising and significant ways, 140 characters at a time.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an RT to attend to.
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