Friday, May 29, 2009

Twitter Time

I was on car pool duty, arranging rides for a group of Michiana teens, but nobody had a phone number for one of the kids. Apparently today’s youth use the telephone for matters of practicality not so much, compared to previous generations. What about email, I asked. Email is over, email is so yesterday, my passengers from Teen Planet informed me. They’re tracking and arranging their lives on Facebook.

But most people know Facebook by now – even fogies like me have Facebook pages for staying stay in touch with friends. The new is wearing off and it’s time for restless techies to move on.  So let’s all try Twitter, which has the advantage of being simple and not very time-consuming. On Twitter, you send a short message from your phone or computer to anybody who subscribes to your account. Those messages are called tweets, and subscribers are called followers. A famous person like Oprah might genuinely have one million followers reading her tweets – imagine that. Hope she’s got something to say.

Everybody knows that good things come in very small packages.  But seriously, a web service where your messages are limited to 140 characters – not words but type-strokes, and every space and punctuation mark counts? That’s a Twitter message for you, a tweet. If you go on too long, Twitter cuts you off. Why? Are we running out of electrons or something?

And what can you say in 140 characters, anyway?  Here’s what one of history’s most beautifully compressed documents, the Gettysburg Address, becomes in Twitter’s hands: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the prop

Not quite as satisfying as Lincoln’s original text, is it? But you can turn his ten classic sentences into a little tweet like this: 87 years of liberty, and now this shocking battlefield is consecrated by soldiers’ blood. We must fight on, for human freedom must not die.

I’ll take the original version any day. It’s awfully easy to make fun of Twitter, which certainly suffers from human excess just like other parts of the Internet. For example, one sad Michiana resident uses Twitter to record her frequent bouts of drinking. But other people from many walks of life have heard the promise of melody in Twitter’s humble tweet.

For down deep, Twitter is completely open and free and flexible.  You can do anything social with it; it’s a platform for people to people invention. Some folks connect around a shared hobby or because they attend the same college; some share restaurant tips in a tourist town; some advertise their commercial services while others just keep up with friends. For me, the most interesting ones, though, are far-flung individuals who come together around an issue they care about.

For example, on Twitter, you can easily find a few dozen journalists working on how to reinvent a new, 21st century newspaper that will serve democracy without bankrupting the owners. These folks trade ideas every day; they provide links to relevant articles; they create podcasts where two or three of them discuss the latest developments in this very pressing issue. Over time, they coalesce as a community, and their ideas clarify and grow strong, all because they share their thinking each day in 140-character bursts of captured energy on Twitter. If you’re doing something that would be enriched by conversation, Twitter can help kindred spirits find you.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on May 29, 2009
Community • Customs & Rituals • Media & Technology • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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