Three Reasons to Love the Twitter Hate
April 23, 2009 by Craig Stoltz
Longtime Twitteurs are in a hyperventilating snit over the ridicule being heaped on their plaything by, among others, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau.
I’m a longtime Twitteur, semi-evangelical and pretty well engaged with it on a daily basis. By this point it is as integrated in my being as lymph. But I think the ridicule is a delightful, even important development.
1. It’s a great time for a Twitter reality check.
It’s easy for insiders to get swayed by early adopter enthusiasm and begin to assume that anybody who doesn’t “get it” is a fool, rube or coward. It’s warm and nice in an echo chamber ringing with validation and self-love. It’s how Scientology works, and both political parties. Yet truth told, all the Twitter-bashing by people I respect has caused me to raise some of the existential questions about this maddeningly powerful little platform that I ignore on a daily basis. What’s gold and what’s garbage? What’s time wasted and a valuable investment? Who exactly is this persona I’m creating through accumulated actions rather than intent? I’m guessing the TwitterTrashing is doing the same for others, including–perhaps especially–those whose knickers are currently most entangled by it.
2. It’s making Twitter visible to the public at large in a usefully skeptical context.
It is no coincidence that Twitter’s [alleged] doubling of users from around 7 million to about 14 million in the past few months has occurred during the time mainstream media has been reporting on its use and abuse and [at the same time] adopting it in their work [while often ridiculing each other for doing so]. It’s healthy for mass culture to first encounter Twitter knowing that Senator Buttwhistle has made a fool of himself on the floor and that Twitter helped citizens of Moldova communicate about their street protests. This prevents childish enthusiasm or ignorant dismissal, neither of which is productive.
3. Mass resistance of a technology by “thought leaders” is a dependable predictor of its imminent acceptance.
As a journalist covering personal technology for The Washington Post back in [I am not making this up] 1994, I recall vividly how much cultural pushback there was against the Web, mobile computing, cell phones, DVD players and even, for god’s sake, e-mail. For instance: the late, legendary Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of the Post at that time, famously declared that she would not accept any submissions by e-mail, that anyone who truly had important things to say would send their work on paper, via U.S. mail or hand messenger. When we got that internal memo [by e-mail!], my colleague Rob Pegoraro and I wondered how quickly she would capitulate. Answer: Less than 3 months.
So I’m feeling good about this: Personal reality check, public introduction with skeptical context, and evidence of imminent acceptance.
So bring it on, Twitter-bashers, and welcome to this odd, infuriating and [ultimately, inevitably] culturally transforming technology.
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Reminds me when AOL asked me observe the arrival of its members into the great expanse of Internet newsgroups and email. This was (if you can believe there was such at time) before the web, in the days of all text, gopher, wais, etc. All the walled consumer gardens were then linking their email systems through their spanking new routers. Many internet denizens were appalled at the idea that AOL users were descending into their sacred zone.
But then, the more there are, the more there are. So when Mozilla appeared, there was a handy 12 million person beta group to shake it out.
One of your sharpest posts, Craig — wise, provocative and cleverly written.
My primary social media habit is still Facebook, and here’s my embarrassing question du jour: What’s the key edge that Twitter offers that my FB status updates can’t accomplish?
R
Ramsey, I’m not as wise or as provocative as Craig, but I’m finding Twitter far more useful to me as a journalist than Facebook.
Facebook is a headline service. The space limitation forces people to radically condense their thought, and that makes it easy to scan dozens of Tweets in a minute, looking for golden bits of information. Plus there’s no risk of getting sidetracked by cute baby pictures, as there is on Facebook. All in all a great reporter’s tool.
Yeah, what she said. Nancy’s nailed it.
Despite FB’s adopting a news feed that resembles Twitter, it really doesn’t serve journalists the same way. n.b.: If you use Tweetdeck [and some other tools], you can choose to publish your Tweets to FB simultaneously if you like–and [nicely] make that choice for each Tweet.
Dang! I forgot to circle back for the response! Thanks, Nancy. Your explanation makes sense to me. Reporting mostly inside the world of med/science these days, so will soon explore how it flies in this tiny parallel universe….
For some real-time fun, follow the hashtag #swineflu [or just do a Twitter search on swineflu and you’ll see instantly that any reporter who is covering the outbreak is simply out of the loop if they are not on Twitter. There’s simply no other source of real-time, geographically-dispersed data, much of it provided by really good sources. Sure, plenty of crap too, but that doesn’t devalue the platform from a journalists’ POV.
If I were a health editor in a newsroom now, and if a reporter were not following all this swineflu stuff on Twitter, I’d demand to know why. Smug? Shy? Frightened? Ignorant?
Craig, great post; Nancy, great comment. You captured what I wish I could articulate every day when people ask why I use Twitter (and the deja vu all over again when people are dismissive). My motto has been the same since 1994: use the technologies that make sense for your life.
As for #swineflu, I happened to be in a meeting yesterday with Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. He did a quick search of his 10M internet-user “observed behavior” database and Tweeted: @billtancer Searches for “swine flu” more than double searches for “bird flu” in Oct 2005
The top source was CDC.gov (by a mile) followed by Wikipedia (and then lower down: CBC.ca, WebMd…)
I wonder if @CDCemergency @GetReady and other social tech efforts are having an effect on general awareness since Twitter is like a hive and we are the bees, hopefully spreading accurate information.
However, as I said at the “Health 2.0 meets Ix” meeting, there is a huge swath of Americans who are just not into our hive. 61% of adults are rooted in old media, vs. 39% of adults who are “motivated by mobility” (and likely to be on FB, MySpace, Twitter etc).
Susannah–Thanks for all this. That distinction in demographics between mobility/FB on the one hand and desk jockey/Twitter is very interesting. Full of implications re: online behavior and business models.
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