It is quite embarrassing that I haven’t posted anything in over two months. It seems, just looking at my output, that my enthusiasm has waned in 2009. This isn’t the case—I am a person whose thoughts on a given subject far outpace any action related to it—and it is something I am always trying to rectify.
Those I know personally who read this blog know that I suffered from overwork, exhaustion, and pains in my hands and arms that essentially forced me to stop blogging for the sake of my health. I was no real writer, as I did not sacrifice my precious down time to spend it on the computer.
But I was also deeply embarrassed by my previous comments on Twitter.
I didn’t even want to write again about Twitter, having another post tagged under it. But I feel I need to redress previous comments made. Over the past two months, I grew to hate the service. It overtook my life. Companies demand to know how many tweets on a given topic are said on a particular day, and to compile these numbers is overwhelming, in a nutshell. I’ve read all the positive press, from Steven Berlin Johnson’s cover in Time (which I would have known in advance had I not been so ridiculously busy June 4, as I follow him), to well, pretty much any mainstream story on it that appeared on Google News. And I am just so fucking sick of fucking Twitter.
I tried it out. It’s too short for my liking, too much information too fast, and not a reliable way to filter through. Unlike checking email and blogs and Facebook and all our other online “chores”, I didn’t want to invest the time in it, and so I didn’t. It’s like a pet—if you love animals and reap real benefit, great. But if you have no desire to spend your time and resources on it, then don’t.
I’ve also grown to dislike the way certain industries tout its service, and how it’s become a necessity for interaction, a requirement. I want to opt out! I don’t want to be forced to take part! I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about Twitter (this was before I had grown to full-on hate it, when I was still in ambivalent mode), and we both found blogging to be far more useful. Twitter is too maniacal for her, an assault of nonsensical, mundane thoughts strewn with links. Blogs were thoughtful, occasionally insightful and filled with information and humor.
Of course, in the interim between this post and my last post, there have been plenty of stories written about this, how many bloggers have moved on to other mediums, who can't find the time, and yet, in every conceivable publication imaginable, how beneficial the service is and why you need to have one.
I found out about Michael Jackson’s death relatively early—a coworker blasted through, announcing it. I went on Google News immediately, found nothing but cardiac arrest, and demanded proof. “TMZ! TMZ! Check it!” Still very skeptical, I did—and was met with a three-sentence item followed by “more to come.”
So the most interesting thing throughout the entire excess coverage of this exceedingly bizarre person for me was the timing and accuracy of the information, that for many people, myself included, we didn’t believe the story until it was confirmed by more traditional outlets. As the Los Angeles Timesput it,
“Few people expect TMZ or Drudge or the National Enquirer to get things right or to report on issues of substance. When they do, at least so far, it’s a bit of an anomaly. So the consequences for getting it wrong among such sites do not seem terribly high. If CNN, Fox … got such things wrong, the consequences would likely be higher.
As much as people love to glee over the death of the mainstream media, we still rely on them heavily for trusted information, for confirmation and access, no matter the story. Yes, our trust in them has eroded over the decades, each successive scandal further lowering the scale, but online hoaxes are quick, and Twitter and its ilk are just as much about hype, rumor and misinformation as the high school prom. But, as much as I dislike TMZ and the ever-larger paparazzi mill, they are becoming a trusted source in their field.
“Since when has Twitter become the big thing?” my brother asked me the other week, in reference to the Ashton Kutcher/CNN “battle” that came to a head two Thursdays ago. Twitter, which has been around for a few years, was having its Best Week Ever.
I have been debating whether to join Twitter for months, even before Clive Thompson’s fantastic article last summer, which definitely put me in the “no way” camp. I have enough technology ruling my life, and I am always struck by the difference between the rat race of the internet and the slowed pace of those who just don’t give a damn. But in the last couple of months, it seemed inevitable that I would join.
I already read certain people’s Twitter feeds. It was interesting to see their thoughts on a topic, however brief, and some people were genuinely interesting. It also offered an unfiltered look, much realer than any documentary could show, at certain stars and their lives, just because they were the ones speaking, instead of through publicists or agents and interviewers. Many people, from Julia Allison to Emily Gould to Ashton Kutcher himself (5:00) have commented on this, the ability to write your own story, create your old world, a historical record if you will, without others defining you. That is a real draw, to have an authentic self out there.
But in this day and age, with “authentic” and “brand” nearly always in the same sentence, one has to practically be a brand to get any traction. Job seekers are told they have to market themselves, to think of themselves as a product or service that someone needs, and that they stand for something. Twitter takes this further: each person’s tweets, an extension of themselves, make up their essence, and that essence has to be sold. Britney Spears has an account, but it is not just her, it is the Britney brand. John Mayer is John Mayer, and while some could argue he is a brand, he’s just doing his thing. Having a Twitter, like having one’s own webpage, is considered by many to be an essential part of one’s brand.
But we all don’t need to be brands, and this segues into the way consumerism has infiltrated every part of our lives. Brands can evolve, but they really don’t. People are constantly in flux, unformed. There is much said about the constraints of growing up online, and we are seeing all the time how someone needs to take back something said or an image presented in the past, just because it doesn’t fit them anymore. Seeing discarded or old identities online is funny yet sad, a nostalgia instantly available. I wonder about all the digital graves I will leave in my life—email addresses and webpages discarded after they are no longer useful, friends and relationships that no longer have the glue they once did, but merely a thumbnail reminder that you do, in fact, know them, that you were once someone else. I think about the future of social networks (Twitter is included in the definition) all the time: Will we, as a generation, get tired of Facebook and its ilk as we grow older, finding it too time consuming? Will we get tired of being constantly connected and a new movement to go off the grid start? Will it merely be just another aspect of the web that everyone has, like email, or will it grow into its own subculture, just another thing that some people do but that others don’t?
The 140 character limit, and the loss of grammar and complete thought, is another criticism of Twitter. It is hard to write compelling in such a short space, and indeed I have had to, wincingly, used abbreviations and netspeak that I normally avoid. But like anything else, Twitter is what you make of it. I see Twitter as a place to share information. It’s different from a Facebook status update in that it isn’t some musing blasted out to 200 of your friends, but to a group of people you may not necessarily know, and that can be tracked and categorized so that strangers can read what you’re thinking. Companies, including Twitter’s founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, are working on monetizing this, since some companies like Dunkin Donuts and JetBlue have become success stories using the service, showing marketing and business people how to interact with their customers and drive brand loyalty. I personally do not care about such things—even links of coupons will just ennoble me to spend money on things I don’t need or want, and to get caught up in unnecessary chatter.
“Unnecessary chatter” is how those who denigrate the service would describe it. It is very true. Everyone wants to be listened to, but no one has the patience to listen to others. Following hundreds or thousands of people is time-consuming, sure, and the importance of the information received varies, yet we all want others to take us seriously, even if it’s just in jest. I often wonder, since I follow a lot of journalists, how the hell they manage to get any work done. I know I don’t, and I’ve been on the service for only a short time.
The hype has made a whole bunch of folks rush out and create an account, trying to see if they can figure out the service and maybe garner some love. Yet at times it’s ridiculous, as Brian Williams points out on The Daily Show a few weeks ago:
How did John McCain go from being technologically illiterate to a functional Twitterer? How in the world did congressmen not realize that snarking on the president when he’s about to give an important speech would be seen as a stupid thing? Dude, I’m already conscious that I can be found on Twitter and that if I say something wrong, it will get back to me, and I’m not a chosen representative. But I made that choice, the choice to promote myself (it is very much a marketing and promotional tool), and decided after much handwringing, to say fuck it and do it.
I agree with many, many of the arguments against Twitter, and Samantha Bee and The Daily Show, as usual, summed it up perfectly:
Media frenzies, especially when you are somewhat involved, even peripherally, are hard to escape. But I’ve noticed that my enthusiasm has waned. It would never occur to me to list my boring activities for the day; those are better meant for people for whom it interests. It is very much a broadcasting service, but it’s not the fashion reserved for that witty away message that so dominates college life. Not enough people try to be witty on Twitter, and in some ways it’s a great stalking tool, since people you don’t know will reference who they are hanging out with and where.
Numbers-wise, Twitter isn’t anything like Facebook, especially in terms of early adopters. Young people aren’t flocking to Twitter; they may be wetting their feet now, but it was mostly business and tech people who called it home for the most part at first, since they were the ones to grab onto it as a marketing platform back when we were all figuring out what the heck a newsfeed was. Young people are getting credited, but the teenagers aren’t helping us out, since they’re still on Facebook and MySpace. But it’s a given that a technological fad would be started by those young, tech-savvy people, since those two adjectives are now best friends.
There was the little blip on the radar that Oprah now Twitters, though she made quite a faux paus on her first day (calling the twitterati “Twitters” instead of “Twitterers” and posting in all caps, the latter inexcusable), which was a giant groan to the rest of the world who know that Oprah = massive mainstream takeover. All the mothers who don’t already blog will now be running on Twitter, the thinking goes. But it turns out that large numbers of people abandon the service within a month, and Twitter has what many see as a shockingly low retention rate of 40%. Twitter does take getting used to, and it does have a bit of a bad rap; in addition, its web site sucks, and while the idea behind Twitter is simple, mastering the language and the apps and the whole culture is confusing as hell. (Hashtags, anyone?)
While it’s great for passing information, sometimes getting too much credit as a form of new journalism, it is also ripe for misinformation. Twitter can be just another RSS feed (or a series of them), or it can be a note-taking device, a sort of journal of your world, a incredibly long, incredibly complex system of notes on your life, a version of what went down when and where, what you were willing to expose and to who, what anguished you and enraged you and filled you with joy, hope, and laughter. What you loved and lost, cried over and found. Who you were, at any given moment in time.
If it is possible to encapsulate your life from every bit of online activity recorded, all the reminders, questions and problems would add up to another sort of log. This scares a lot of people and excites others; it’s all about who controls the information, and the limits of the controls that are placed on the user. We look back at the past from letters and photographs, but now we can add status and away messages to the litany of LiveJournal-like musings that take up any one of our days.
But the personal revolution of information is not just based on observations and randomness—two words that can describe the web—but on how we shape what we want to know. Facebook has predicated many of its recent redesigns on this premise, so that we get updated news reports on the Mets next to photo albums of our friends. Twitter takes this to the next level, with us following people who hand off information that we’re interested in. We’re our own personal wire service, disseminating information strictly related and of importance to ourselves. The personal revolution.
This, of course, has wide-ranging implications in all sorts of industries, from watching the ascent of iTunes singles to newspapers going the way of our own personal online mashup of news. Of course, it is not necessary to embrace the entire spectrum of the personal revolution; clearly, those that mock Twitter endlessly do not see it in the same continuum as picking and choosing what news sources and stories to follow. Twitter is merely another tool in today’s information-gathering box.
So to those haters, of which I was once a part: Yes, Twitter is dumb. Yes, it is information overload. But while you acknowledge that Twitter does have some real uses and has spawned real knowledge and awareness, you can’t only laud the service when it fits that purpose. Meaning, you cannot have it be a source for youth protests without having many of the same users use it to chatter about how hot or cold the weather is. People tend to talk about Twitter in its extreme forms—either as a watercooler news source for stories that are just breaking, or as a way for the bored and lonely to pretend that the people really care about what they are eating for breakfast. Yes, those examples exist, but the vast majority of tweets fall in between, and people are genuinely trying to connect to someone, even if it is under the auspicious reasoning of broadcasting to the world that you loved last night’s episode of House.
The genesis of this post is from the New York Times Magazine story on Twitter that ran in September. Most of it, including everything on Julia Allison, was written following its publication. This is part one out of a two-parter on Twitter; I felt that the second entry was incomplete without this one. I have tried to keep the spirit of my thoughts from several months ago intact, and tried not to reference anything that has since taken place.
A few weeks ago, I contemplated joining Twitter. I liked the idea of posing a question and getting responses, and it’s supposed to be great for business. But then I read “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You”, and said absolutely no way.
Although I’ve previously disparaged the service—a cross between Facebook status updates and AIM away messages—as being a little too connected, a little too much work for me, I toyed with the idea. It’s great for soliciting opinions, finding information, and a lot of businesses are using it this way. In certain industries, often involving the media (marketing, PR, advertising, journalism), it’s touted as a way for journalists to get a feel for what’s out there. Of course, at this point, I know one person on Twitter, and it’s an outgrowth of her job. It’s one of those things that people will join if others are on it. But I still cranked, sounding like a crotchety old fogey, “Why would anyone want to constantly update their profiles every five minutes with what they’re thinking or doing? Who has that kind of time?” It would also take stalking to a whole new level.
But Thompson’s piece, which discusses how social networking sites, specifically Twitter, are creating a whole new type of intimacy, made me think of the status message in a whole new way.
At the basic level, it’s is a version of intimacy—a version that often feels so real it’s hard to remember that’s it’s not true intimacy. Who doesn’t wish for some updated profile, an away message, something, to tide you over when you want to talk to a specific person and they aren’t there?
The overarching point isn’t new; most people find social sites to be a way to keep in touch with friends far easier, a way of keeping everyone up-to-date. They’re also great for networking, for keeping “weak ties”—those people you had class with, long-ago coworkers and neighbors—within reach.
I know for me, online contact has made my relationships richer. In addition to blogs, texting, phone calls and face time, I’ve been able to see what my friends have been thinking. This sounds like I always know everything, but this is far from the case, as very few of these channels are used frequently by any one of my friends and they rarely overlap.
Social networking sites have been a godsend to me. As a kid, I was terrible about keeping in touch—I thought about my friends, I wanted to talk to them, but translating that to action, to write a letter or to call a home line and go through parents, was the hard part. It shouldn’t be, but the privacy of the technological revolution, of everyone having their own email address, Facebook profile, and mobile line, also made it easier to have a private conversation.
Yet the biggest question of all is the future, how our generation (and future ones) will react to having most or all of their life documented. How do you erase those memories when they are up for everyone to see? Before the pictures would be stashed in drawers or albums, if not thrown away—only looked at when stumbled upon, or necessitating a move or some cathartic curiosity. Can you ever get over anyone if you are in constant touch, if their picture or profile is so readily available? Thompson touches on this, using a very common example of a break-up.
I once remember a friend of mine officially announcing her relationship on Facebook. I woke up one Sunday morning, logged onto Facebook, and saw the news. It was inevitable, both the fact they made it official and that one day I would receive major news via Facebook first, but I was disappointed that I hadn’t been told in person before it was online for the world to see. I still feel this way, but I’ve realized that finding out personally first is a rarity now; the first thing most people do when they have major news (especially of a romantic variety) is to broadcast it on Facebook. After all, we realized that they put up this notice immediately after they had the conversation. It’s the easiest way; it saves time, rather than telling all your close friends personally and then letting the news filter through, this way everyone knows at more or less the same time.
But cutting off ties online isn’t so easy, as you cannot erase or force information about other people to disappear just because you are angry, unlike the age-old image of ripping up an old photo. People grow and change, move on and move away…yet you are still connected, still able to follow along the rough outlines of their life regardless of them knowing.
Sociologists call this “ambient awareness”, being aware through constant contact, but in a sort of passive way. We don’t have to actually see people in person, talk to them on the phone; we can just read their updates and “know” them. But we don’t really know them at all; even online contact with good friends is a poor substitute for real contact, as anyone who’s misunderstood an AIM message can attest.
But online interactions open one up to the world. Feeling bored, lonely, left out? Join an online community—there are millions, at least one guaranteed to find something that piques your interest. Seriously. Sounds like a kind of heaven, doesn’t it? People who are willing to talk to you about anything, anytime, sometimes even in real time!
People suddenly seem to have more friends. Quantifying relationships would be a depressing and frustrating exercise—who goes into what category?—but luckily, social networking sites do the heavy lifting for you. The biggest benefit to all of these new relationships is that you suddenly realize that you “know” a lot of people.
Twitter uses followers, not friends, delineating that even those these people are interested in what you say, they don’t know you; you follow information about them, like a favorite star, because they are funny, but you don’t know them personally. It’s just on an incredibly micro level.
But this constant self-disclosure, the openness into the mundanity of life, can define you. Twitter, as much as any other social-networking tool, can be used to foster your identity, to essentially, create yourself as you want others to see you, in all its trite detail.
This brings me to Julia Allison.
I first heard of Julia Allison when she made the cover of Time Out New York’s Valentine’s Day issue. She’s holding up a paper that says “Call me!” and the phone number underneath is her actual number. This fact alone got a lot of press, though apparently she was already somewhat well-known to a type of New York media/tech/web/gossip follower.
Some have called Allison the real-life, Gen-Y version of Carrie Bradshaw, others a type of Paris Hilton, since she’s essentially famous for no reason.
Allison is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time, because she exhibits the type of exhibition and narcissism that is a hallmark of our generation and of the underbelly of our current culture. Her genius, as explored in the August issue of Wired, is that she marketed herself. She wanted to be famous—excuse me, “cult figure”—so she used the tools at her disposal—mainly the web—to get it. Although she has written for AM New York, Time Out New York and is some sort of consultant for Star magazine, these are merely footnotes in her biography. What’s greater is the relationships she’s exploited to become famous. She’s dated a lot of powerful media and tech types, and has written about this in detail in the way that is compulsively horrifying, then adding commentary upon commentary upon other’s criticism of her relationships. It gets very meta, very confusing in the way that is so wonderful and awful about the Internet.
As writer Jason Tanz put it, “Allison’s greatest accomplishment isn’t the volume of content she creates; it’s that she gets anyone to care about it. Her trick, she says, is to think of herself as the subject of a magazine profile, with every post or update adding dimensions to her as a character.”
Wired’s piece, in addition to another fantastic New York Times Magazinefeature, this time by Emily Gould, discuss how the Internet blurs reality—how you can get so caught up with going online that your real life outside of the computer no longer feels real. It, essentially, takes over your life. The computer becomes a compulsion, a poor substitute for real human contact. It has saved and helped numerous people immeasurable, but it has also been used for much harm and pain, and we often do it to ourselves. Our little corner can get bigger and bigger, until it engulfs us, and we feel it’s the entire world, and that it’s the only thing that matters.
Internet hype, internet celebrity, does that. At the end of every season, it feels like, to turn on the TV or open a paper, that American Idol is the only thing going on, yet in a few weeks the names will have faded, and in a few years those same names will be reduced to trivia answers. Parlaying internet notoriety is a hell of a lot harder than it sometimes seems, because the nature of the beast is that information moves fast, too fast for most people to play.
But that is the way of the world today, and like they said in the ‘60s, you can “turn on, tune in, or drop out.” Dropping out never seems to last for long, as both Gould and Allison can attest, as they are suckered back in after vowing to keep their lives private. But this break should be more accurately called a respite, since that’s what it is; they never fully extricate themselves from the past they have written, and even if they did, their past is still there for anyone to find.
Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.
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A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"
