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Twittering awayMarch 22nd, 2007 |
I am an information junkie. I admit it. I have 75 RSS feeds set up in my reader as a sidebar in my browser (Sage in Firefox). I have, after much much pruning, reduced my bookmark set to only 35 sites here at work (at home, it is maybe 5 times bigger than that). If I am honest with myself, they turned into RSS feeds, mostly. Worse, every day I visit at least four message forums and scan through recent posts.
I am also on IM and email. I hit the news sites, like CNN or BBC, usually three or four times a day. I get both Time and Entertainment Weekly delivered at home, and actually read them cover to cover (usually on a two week delay). Plus, I get two or three other magazines that were given as gifts.
It’s easy to get into information overload mode.
At SXSW, all the buzz was about Twitter, a service which is sort of like public texting, or microblogging. It’s all the rage among the lifelogging crowd: the folks who want to maintain records of all their activity — often publicly. The idea is that you send out quick little updates about what you are doing, pretty much constantly all day. You can subscribe to channels for groups or individuals, and basically monitor what they say they are doing. For a sense of what this is like without actually joining Twitter, check out this nifty map that shows Twitters based on location.
There is something hypnotically addictive about Twitter. At SXSW they had plasma screens up showing conference-related tweets as they went by. People found it incredibly useful for coordinating gatherings on the fly, since they could access it via their phones, get updates constantly on where their friends were having dinner, and let everyone who might care know that they were running late.
Me, I mostly spent my time at SXSW arguing about Twitter. To me, there’s a fine line between a tweet of real information and well, twittering. Watching the plasma screen scroll by, I was struck by how many messages were “How do I get this to STOP??!?!?”
I’m not the only skeptic. I have commented that something about Twitter felt a little faddish to me: something that felt like it was hot in techie circles, but maybe not quite in touch with the real world. And the dictionary definition of twittering, after all, is that it is “trivial information.”
twit·ter [twit-er] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –verb (used without object)
ər
1. to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.
2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.
I voluntarily absorb enough trivia as it is… a couple of years ago, there was a lot of attention paid to Linda Stone’s notion of continuous partial attention, and the fact that psychological and cognitive research shows that in some ways there ain’t no such thing. Multitasking is a myth, because task switching has a cost to humans. We may grow more comfortable at floating between streams of data, but the fact remains that we cannot pay deep attention to too many things at once.
But of course, there’s more going on than just the exchange of information. There’s also the sensation of being present in a social matrix. We talk to others not only because we want to trade data, but also because we want to see a response, we want to know at some atavistic level that there are others out there who care. In that sense, the sensation of reading Twitters is like floating in a vast sea of connectedness.
To some degree, it feels like illusory connectedness, in that Twitter is really not a good medium to hold a conversation (defined as the mutual turn-based exchange of information). You subscribe to people, you don’t engage with them; indeed, already, much like blogs themselves, we see celebrities with large groups of followers.
In the end, I find myself ambivalent. Will Twitter be successful? Yes, I think it probably will. Will it be good for you? I’m torn, and think the answer is probably not. Will it sustain? I don’t know. As an information junkie, I ditch the feeds and forums and sites that aren’t giving me a high-enough caliber of stuff on a regular basis. Twitter wouldn’t make the cut, most likely.
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