Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
That’s exactly how I feel about it: it’s crossfire, and you have to piece it together. It’s not rocket surgery. I do the same thing every day with new items from every feed in my list, but those are usually articles, about something; they’re not a real time movie script fed through a shredder that you have to stitch back into a narrative.
Believe you me, there’s a place for one liners, and there’s a point to briefness. But it’s a horrible serialization for prose and dialogue.
From reading your article I have come to a new conclusion, Twitter is like a broken RSS for simple people.
By Chris · 2010.03.15 08:37
I think the confusing crossfire thing is less of an issue if you don’t try to be a social media internet celebrity web 2.0 SEO expert kind of person who “follows” a thousand people. If, instead, you follow a human-scaled circle of real-life friends and figures in interesting niches – people whose stories you are already immersed in – the noise resolves into a sort of supplemental signal. On their own, each one-liner is inane and scatterbrained, but in the context of interests and relationships that develop across many channels, those one-liners provide a little extra fidelity and flavor.
Another way to say it is that I don’t follow people on Twitter because I’m interested in their “tweets”; I follow people on Twitter because I’m interested in the people. I know them in real life, or I read their blog, or I’m familiar with their work in other media. The tweets are a bonus.
That said, I’m clearly a twit, and I do enjoy posting or reading the occasional pointless pun. At least I don’t have really useless habits like watching TV.
By Jim · 2010.03.15 13:47
The above is all true if you follow people who twitter way too much about bullshit. Same if you read RSS feeds of jackasses every day.
Cars are not great swimmers. Twitter is not great for longform prose.
By Phil Nelson · 2010.03.15 17:01
I didn’t say “longform prose”. I said “prose”, which is attempted at times, and “dialogue”, which it seems that the whole thing has been turned into, mostly.
Neither Joel and I are reacting to some theoretical case, how people might be using Twitter if they were to be doing something incredibly stupid. We’re reacting to reality, how people are actually using Twitter in such a way that it’s not particularly enjoyable to follow.
By Jesper · 2010.03.15 20:28
And good point, Jim. Maybe I’d be happier with Twitter if I used it in that way.
Even great thinkers don’t use Twitter to think great thoughts, though; they use it to say “I’m here, thinking great thoughts; the view is nice and the coffee is piping hot”. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s all it is, for fuck’s sake. But given most of the rest that gets thrown around there, I just don’t see anything right with it either.
By Jesper · 2010.03.15 20:58
I’m pretty happy with the twitter stream. The people I follow use it in a way that I enjoy every single day. Anecdote for anecdote, I feel like I can match you on this one.
By Phil Nelson · 2010.03.15 21:37
Awesome. I wasn’t aware that this was a pissing contest.
By Jesper · 2010.03.15 23:57
Twitter is what you want it to be, is kinda an olistic entity, depending on how you choose your timeline. It’s made of friends, people who share with you your interests, people you don’t know but shares with you seeds of creativity or work or whatever.
But as in real life, there are people that are worth the following, others that don’t. Maybe they are great in their job but I don’t care about what they just finished eating.
By suprandr · 2010.03.17 15:09
I get that Twitter doesn’t fit some folks’ style. Facebook didn’t fit mine, so I deleted my account.
I also get that Twitter doesn’t create a space for good prose. Or even for extensive dialog.
But it is good at short-form dialogue, and catalyzing incomplete ideas until they bubble into other forums, and lowering the cost of finding people in your real life neighborhood you might actually want to know better.
Because, you know, “the coffee is piping hot” isn’t an original insight, and that’s exactly what makes it socially valuable. I don’t know about you, but I don’t make friends with my neighbors by scheduling lectures at my house, I make friends by calling out as I walk by, and checking in with how their day went, and finding small moments of common experience.
And Twitter is like that, except better. Because I don’t just get the shared experience, I also get a little dialogue, or a truncated thought and a link that leads me somewhere to find something deeper. Or a bit of news that I, who no longer consumes media in anything approaching a traditional way, might have otherwise missed. Or, hell, a creative challenge that makes me at least think a little harder about how much space a writer needs to make something “real”.
Twitter isn’t a blog, or a book, or a real life conversation. But what it does, it does really pretty well. And what it does contains real value. I can name you over a dozen people in my immediate neighborhood who I am now friends with, and interact with in real life, due specifically to Twitter. And I can name about two dozen more in other cities with whom I have developed enough of a (real) relationship that we even conspire on an occasional project together. Which has led to real life gigs, and, yes, unproductive joking.
It’s cool to not use it. No harm in that. It doesn’t work if it doesn’t fit your style. But why the hatin’? I don’t get it.
By Christopher Ashworth · 2010.03.19 19:22
I am not a participant. What I mean by this is that I’m not a participant in the twittersphere, or whatever you would like to call it. I don’t wish to keep up an account merely to be able to make sense of what other people write. There are few people more about enabling unproductive joking than your humble chronicler.
I didn’t “hate” on people’s ability to say whatever they want as much as I did on the way in which it’s difficult for me to extract anything of value — and yes, “mere” communication instead of article prose is indeed of value — unless I go all in, which I don’t want to. You will have noted the emphasis on splicing everything together. That also includes keeping track of everyone’s many-to-many hollering. The reason I brought up media similar to weblogs was to highlight that when the content is about something and a reasonable work, that’s a lot easier to do. If everything is twenty in-jokes or fleeting thoughts, no matter how good, the value proposition in juggling these numerous entries by hand — many people who really use Twitter rack up several pages per week — goes sour. The volumes to piece back together goes up into the stratosphere.
Until they make these things easy to manage, they won’t win me over. That’s not meant as a prediction that Twitter will fail or indeed have to please me. But it is my current position.
By Jesper · 2010.03.19 21:46
Fair enough. It does require going in, as you say. I agree it’s lousy to try to extract anything worthwhile as an outside observer.
I think I was moved to respond more by Spolsky’s remarks than by yours. There’s sort of a snide derision underlying his comment that gets my goat a bit. Plus, it’s inaccurate. For example, a lot of folks do listen to what other people are saying. When it’s working, that’s what makes it work.
Anyway, that gripe aside, there’s no denying it can sometimes be a big mess–especially from the outside.
Not sure I’ve left a comment before, so, for the record: really enjoy the blog.
By Christopher Ashworth · 2010.03.20 02:08
Yes, that was the first comment; I know so because I have WordPress set to let through anything by anyone I’ve already approved once, and I had to approve your first comment on this post. Thanks.
And once again, to make myself painfully clear (you got it, but I still put it a bit too fuzzily for my own taste), I don’t deride people for making conversation on Twitter. But people making conversation on Twitter is exactly what makes it hard to follow, even though it’s not very much different model-wise from having a feed reader with a bunch of feeds.
Context plays into assembling something. You can read odd articles in your feed reader and plow through what someone posted the past week, but you practically have to correlate everything back and forth if you’re trying to read Twitter from the outside.
By Jesper · 2010.03.20 16:12