Twitter is like crack for people with ADD.
Which, it turns out, includes like OMG everybody younger than me, several big name bloggers and at least one presidential candidate.
Twitter is like junk food for small, self-absorbed brains.
Because it’s all about telling a group of people what you’re doing right now, all the time…not conversing, mind you; more like shouting at a party to no one in particular about whatever random nonsense that’s popped into your head at that moment.
Twitter is…the perfect storm.
For those of you Luddites that haven’t yet heard of the twitter phenomenon, and it does seem to be evolving into a phenomenon, let me give you a quick update.
Twitter is a new web service founded by Evan Williams and Biz Stone. The two previously collaborated at Pyra Labs, the company behind the blogging platform Blogger, that was acquired by Google in February 2003 (pre-IPO) for an undisclosed sum.
Interestingly, last October Evan was somehow able to buy out venture capitalists Charles River and all the other initial investors into Odeo, which at the time was the company that built and owned the applications odeo and twitter. The new company he formed to do this buy-out, Obvious Corp, in which Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees are also shareholders, then sold the odeo application to Sonic Mountain for about a million bucks last week, allowing them to focus their full resources on the burgeoning twitter phenomenon.
How does twitter work? Well, you add your friends on the site, and then start posting what you’re doing via the web, your IM client, or text message from your cell phone. That message then gets distributed to all your friends and followers through their chosen channel. That’s it. That’s twitter.
So like, you can totally be in touch with all your peeps 24/7, sharing such intimate moments as, “OMG brushing my teeth!” “LOL driving to work!” and “ROFL taking out trash!” Honestly, what could be better than that!
But remember, you’re not only sharing these intimate moments with others…they’re sharing them with you! So you also get notified when anyone in your network is “OMG brushing my teeth!” “LOL driving to work!” and “ROFL taking out trash!” Brilliant.
You can probably tell by now that I don’t get it. But it’s not just me, it’s everyone I know. We don’t get it. We don’t want it. But what really makes this painful for me is….it makes me feel old.
This twitter thing has become a dividing line; generational, to a great extent, but more so, attitudinal and behavioral. How do we view technology? What is our need for connectedness? What is our desire for privacy? How do we seek out human contact? What is the length of our attention span?
For me, the growing twitterati symbolizes the dramatic shift taking place in the way people interact with and consume information in all its forms. The question becomes, what are the long-term implications of our collectively decreasing attention spans and collectively increasing propensity to multi-task?
Danny Hillis is the prescient founder of the Long Now Foundation, an organization established in 1996 to encourage people to think long-term.
The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
One of the foundation’s projects is to build a clock, that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, with a cuckoo that comes out every millennium.” I’m pretty sure Danny Hillis isn’t on twitter.
New fMRI studies at Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute suggest that as we get older, we have more trouble tuning out background thoughts when turning to a new task. Great. So I am getting old.
Perhaps, deep down somewhere, I secretly wish I could get excited about this twitter thing, and start shooting off messages left and right about each revelation that passes across my synapses. But then again, maybe I’ll just go read a book. For better or worse, this bird don’t tweet.
