I love
Twitter. I discovered it last fall and very, very slowly have begun to check it
with regularity. At first I was very much against the spirit of the thing:
condensing a thought into 140 characters seemed like an extreme dumbing down of
our already dumbed down conversation. And there is the plethora of banal tweets
that exist out there. Does anyone really need to know what a celebrity is doing
with their day or when their dog takes a crap? Of course not. That piece of
Twitter is the fat that had to be trimmed away to find the substance that this
social platform is capable of.
The most
relevant thing I have found through Twitter is political information. I often
have a fluid and varying schedule, making it difficult to sit and watch the
news at a set time or to be on top of the daily papers. But Twitter is always
there, always bringing to the forefront the newest information. In our world of
constant connection and ever changing political and social structure, being
up-to-date takes on a new immediacy. Twitter offers this immediacy and does so
in fast short hand.
As Postman
points out in this week’s reading, media generation, beginning with the
telegraph and growing into our modern Internet, insists on large scale
conversations because the technology is designed to cover great distances. But
such enormous conversations dictate that the participants be further removed
from each other, lest they begin to converse about things of immediate
importance to their small corner of the world.
From what I
have seen, Twitter does a better job than other social media when it comes to
bridging the gap between distance and immediacy. Twitter is written in a
language nearly unrecognizable to the uninitiated (it took me months to make
sense of it and I still get confused at times) but it is so simple and elegant
in the amount of information that can be dispersed. If our conversations are to
remain worldwide, invariably the new language of the Tweet (or some similar
short hand) will be the standard.
Lastly I
will bring in Dawkins’ well-known concept of memes – thoughts and ideas that
“infect” the mind. The segment from Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene” defines memes
and further begins to delve into the way in which these thought viruses spread
through a population as connected as ours. As Dawkins describes them, memes are
“units of cultural transmission, units of imitation” – by this definition
Twitter is the perfect vehicle for propagating memes. It is a fast, versatile
and mobile platform that doesn’t beg us to know who starts the idea or even who
shares the idea. A Tweet occurs, is re-Tweeted and spreads, is re-Tweeted some
more and like a virus, all of us exposed are infected. Ideas that in the past
might have died very shortly after their inception can now survive on the web
via Twitter for much longer, infecting individuals with distance being no
hindrance.
As I said
at the start of this post, I love Twitter. The information is not always
relevant or useful, but who wants everything we learn to be such? Twitter
appears to me to be one of the most versatile and likely to survive propagators
of memes we’ve encountered yet. It’s made a believer out of me – and I’m
perhaps one of the most adamant skeptics of new media – because Twitter can
offer the best of both sides of the information overload. We can find both
useful and pertinent information alongside trivial and silly information. And
we can filter it so easily that our precious time is hardly wasted.
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