Last Tuesday, Emily Gover, the Statesman copy editor, couldn’t find a good parking spot in the morning and, later on, her iPod broke. Bradley Donaldson, co-Editor-in-Chief, took a long time to get to school because of the snowstorm and thought about a girl that was in one of his classes. My friend Oliver was lying around with an apple stem hanging out of his mouth because he was feeling silly. Robert was chilling in the math lounge at his school in honor of it being “square root day.” And according to NY’s Israeli Consulate, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
How do I know all this? Because I have a Twitter account. Anytime one of my Twitter friends makes a status update (140 character limit), called a “tweet,” I get a notification on my Twitter page, my Twitter plugin for Pidgin (an all-in-one instant messenger client), and on twitter-fox, an extension for my Firefox web browser.
Everyday, my tweets get packaged up and shipped to my LiveJournal account via a service called “LoudTwitter” so I can integrate my personal weblog with Twitter’s “micro-blogging” feature. Twitter is sort of like the Facebook status, without the annoying profile stuff, and the “mini-feed” can get shipped anywhere — even to your mobile phone.
Twitter has been used around the world since 2007, but its momentum has begun to pick up steam and has been picking up lots of media attention. Jon Stewart has recently poked fun at the Internet application on “The Daily Show,” calling it a “gimmick…that messages do not enlighten or inform.”
In certain light, I understand that perspective. During Obama’s recent State of the Union address, the several congressman who “tweeted” their thoughts about the speech, in real time, were criticized because very few of them had anything constructive to say, and shirked their duty of actually listening to the President speak because their texting thumbs were busier than their ears. Critics don’t like the micro-blogging concept because they can’t imagine why anybody would want to keep a running total of their life and tell other people about it. They can’t imagine why anybody would care about the intimate details of other people’s lives, either.
Like other social networking sites, the goal is to stay connected with other people who you may not have physical contact with or even know in-person. What makes Twitter unique is that it can all be done in real time, even if you’re not near a computer. Cell phones and mobile devices, such as the iPod Touch, can be used to update and receive tweets from anywhere.
While the critics are right, there are some people’s lives I truly don’t care about, but those people aren’t on my “follow” list, and I don’t post things I wouldn’t want my boss to know about. Like anything else that is posted on the Internet, it is up to the individual to decide what to tweet and to deal with the consequences of their actions. This is hardly a life lesson that should be restricted to the Internet, however.
Critics also miss the truly great thing about Twitter, but this is something that even the creators probably didn’t envision when they created an Internet tool to keep track of their friends. Twitter is a real time social network through which a great deal of personal, and specific information can be communicated to anyone, anywhere. The implications of this are far-reaching and long-lasting. According to a research report in “New Scientist,” services like Twitter did a better job communicating information than traditional news media or government emergency services. During incidences like the Virginia Tech massacre, the California wild fires and the Mumbai terrorist attack, Twitter was used to coordinate the efforts of emergency workers and to cover the stories.
The first image of the U.S. Airways Flight 1549 crash landing in the Hudson River last January was a cell phone picture uploaded to “TwitPic.”
Businesses and celebrities use Twitter to communicate instantly with fans and customers. This past December, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs used Twitter to hold a “press conference” so the public could ask questions directly about the war with Hamas.
With all due respect to Jon Stewart, do these sound like messages that neither “enlighten nor inform”? While, yes, the noise to signal ratio is pretty high on Twitter, most of that noise matters to someone and, if it doesn’t, it gets ignored without consequence. However, because of Twitter, when an important signal needs to get through, it does so loud and clear.
Because Internet social networks are now starting to transcend computers in a real way, they are quickly becoming an important “next-gen” method of communication.
It is challenging our current conceptions of emergency response systems, news media, accessing information — important and otherwise — and even just chatting with a friend. The cost of long distance communication is being reduced to virtually nothing. And, since the Internet was born out of the concept of social altruism, almost all its services are completely free to users. As a result, it is also changing attitudes about how business gets done.
The critics will scoff, they’ll laugh and they’ll reject it. But then, they’ll either give in or be rendered obsolete themselves. That’s the nature of technology which delivers what consumers want. The Internet is a technological and social revolution that’s providing a whole manner of new things that consumers didn’t even know they wanted but, when faced with it, wouldn’t want to live without.
