Sure I love Twitter. I
love teh tweets so much that I ditched my "personal" account and opted
into a read-only experience. Twitter is history's most advanced way yet
of obtaining small blips of useful information... anywhere you are. On the
desktop, on the phone, in the van, in the can. I'm not so convinced
that its legacy is as a interpersonal communication tool.
A lot of people are going to point to recent situations on Moldova and Iran as proof that Twitter has come of age, supplanted traditional journalism, changed the world. These people won't likely mention that week of endlessly cascading Swine Flu misinformation and paranoia last month, or the service's losing battle against truth verification and endless spam. Try this: read 1,000 scattered updates from #iranelection, then read a dispatch from a BBC reporter who's lived in and studied the region for years. After that, go ahead and tell me what the future of journalism is all about.
That breathless Time article from earlier this month made some really powerful points about shared
experiences. The last two American generations are so starved and
desperate for shared cultural experience that we'll accept anything -- if we can't have Woodstock or World War II, maybe
we'll take #threewordsbeforesex, #iremember, and retweeting proxy
addresses to help Iranian revolutionaries. I wonder how many of the folks with
the green-tinted avatars are exercising old guilt from 2000, when there
were no million-strong street protests or Sea of Green over our own stolen election.
(We didn't have Twitter back then, but we did have e-mail and a cc:
line.)
At its best, Twitter is a dumbed-down Google Reader, but one that
gives you occasional updates from heroes, extended family and distant acquaintances. Those parts
of it work really well.
My favorite thing about Twitter right now, and I'm not being sarcastic about this, is shockspam. The example account above is just one of many that scrapes the list of "trending topics," then adds an imagined headline followed by a link to schwantz enhancers. These tweets are not very effective on their own, they just help the tweetstreams stay broken and confusing.
But look at a list of updates from one of these robotic accounts: this is a stark description of a world in complete upheaval, crumbling around us, a thousand million 9/11's. World leaders and captains of industry dead, bombs going off around the world, pop stars misplacing tapes of themselves fucking on camera. Real actual Armageddon doesn't creep up on you, it happens all at once and everywhere, and the sheer scope of the global tragedy is numbing. This is the kind of clarity that an unfiltered Twitter will never, ever match.
