Do I Really Have To Join Twitter?
What to do if you're just not that into microblogging but don't want to be left behind.
In other words, it's hard for many to shake the feeling that Twitter is a waste of time. It's not only Luddites who feel this way; in the last few months, a surprising number of people in the tech industry—people who fancy themselves the earliest of early adopters—have mentioned to me that they have a hard time wrapping their heads around the service. Many float the idea that Twitter is little more than an overhyped, media-driven sensation.
Is Twitter a fad? It's certainly received more than 140 characters of love from the press recently; everywhere you look, someone in the news is tweeting. But the people on TV rarely seem to address something very basic: What's the point of tweeting? And should you do it? I get variations on this question often from readers. Let's say you're a moderately tech-savvy person who takes well to new forms of gabbing—you've got an easy facility with blogs, you log in to Facebook when you need it, you text, you IM, and perhaps you even talk to your friends through Skype. Is it time for you to jump into microblogging, too? Would you be missing out on some important cultural touchstone if you sat out this round of techno-innovation?
The short answer: Eh, go ahead and give it a try if you like, but there's nothing lame about waiting to see whether Twitter pans out.
Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web. It's not surprising, then, that these new tools deliver obvious social utility—Facebook is the best way to get in touch with old friends, and instant messaging is the quickest way to collaborate with your colleagues across the country. Twitter is different. It's not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short "quips" on bathroom stalls. It's a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience. That's not to say it isn't useful; to some people in some situations, Twitter is irreplaceable. But it is not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.
As a practical matter, Twitter is a cinch to get into: You sign up, pick a few people to follow, then start typing out your thoughts, making sure to keep each post below the 140-character limit. (There are also some conventions you've got to get used to—here's a short primer.) But Twitter, unlike Facebook, favors one-way connections—you can follow my posts, but I don't have to follow yours. As a result, novice Twitterers are met with instant discouragement—you start out with nobody reading your posts, and because the people you follow don't have to follow you, there's no guarantee that you'll ever convince great numbers of people to listen to what you have to say. Twitter is not a meritocracy; you may be the cleverest quipper in your circle, but celebrities and people in the media inevitably win the most followers. There is no justice in the fact that a banal Twitterer like Sen. Claire McCaskill has attracted an audience of more than 19,000. (A typically riveting McCaskill tweet: "Leaving for KC soon. Meeting about American car manufacturing. Then on to Springfield. Press avail there.") But that's how Twitter goes; if you join, be prepared to deal with a lot of people who are undeservedly more popular than yourself.
Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at farhad.manjoo@slate.com .
No comments:
Post a Comment