Don’t Fear Twitter

“Twitter Sucks!, a Good Times article by Alexander Zaitchik, paints Twitter as a sort of Bird of The Apocalypse, a harbinger of ruination and unmitigated ignorance:

What was once just a colorful special-needs classroom on the Internet is starting to look like a steel spike aimed at the heart of what remains of our ability to construct and process complete grammatical sentences and thoughts.

That’s right, folks. A protocol for handling 140-character chunks of text is going to be our undoing. What makes Twitter so evil, you ask?

For one thing, Zaitchik says Twitter supporters make outrageous claims about the value of the service. He rightly points out that while Clive Thompson talks about “ambient awareness” and “shared understanding”, Twitter is full of pointless, vapid narcissism. But what if Twitter were a complex system – full of useless chaff but also capable of enabling useful communication? Isn’t that what most of us have learned about blogs? How is Twitter different?

Zaitchik seems to be using a different service than the Twitter I know. For one thing, he refers to it consistently as a “site”. Twitter is really a protocol. The underlying technology that powers Twitter is used by all kinds of applications, and nobody who uses Twitter on a more than casual basis bothers with the website. While Zaitchik mentions TweetDeck, he doesn’t mention that there are dozens of twitter applications, and that each of them provides its own user experience. For example, I used to use TweetDeck, but I recenty switched to Nambu. I find it gives me much more control over incoming tweets, and allows me to pay attention only to the messages that are important to me.

This brings me to another flaw in Zaitchik’s argument. Like a bee drawn to honey, he can’t help but hold up insipid (“At the park – I love squirrels!”) tweets as evidence of the impending collapse of civilization. It’s as if we’re all going to be strapped down and made to read line after line of banality until we go insane. Maybe he doesn’t realize that you can follow as many or as few Twitter users as you like. Don’t like @lancearmstrong’s training updates? Unfollow him. All it takes is the click of a button. Or don’t follow him in the first place. You can do it. You have the power.

Zaitchik also can’t help but draw conclusions about the psychology of Twitter users:

But nothing reveals age more than being terrified of being thought old, a fear that is obviously driving so much uncritical Twitter praise.

Obviously. Why would anyone find value in Twitter unless they were afraid of being thought uncool? But while Zaitchik points out that the average Twitter user is 31 years old, his blind spot about the opt-in nature of Twitter keeps him from admitting that users tend to follow users who share the same interests, from #deathmetal to #knitting. How do you impress the cool kids with your youthful Twitter vigor if they never see you because you’re too busy sharing tweets with other geezers?

People use Twitter for a variety of reasons. There are plenty of sales folks carpet-bombing their followers with get-rich schemes, and marketing wizards trying to out-tweet each other with social marketing tips and tricks. Every flavor of geek imaginable can be found on Twitter. But Twitter can also serve as a way of staying connected to a community. Plenty of @santacruzgeeks members use Twitter, which creates a sort of virtual water cooler for brief conversations. It is also a handy way of staying in touch with friends, knowing what they’re up, what they’re thinking about, and what they find interesting. Sharing links and photos is a huge part of the Twitter experience.

One of Zaitchik’s final Twitter gripes is that it is time-consuming:

Worse, the constant posting and following of these snapshots takes up lots of precious time, sucking up and fracturing the dwindling number of solid blocks of minutes that remain after checking email, Facebook, MySpace and other now-routine diversions.

I’m not sure what to make of this assertion. Zaitchik is a self-professed Twitter hater who has “followed the site since it was still crying blind in the nest.” So for two and a half years he’s been checking in on Twitter. Why? If he hated it from the get-go, why does he torture himself by returning to the Gates of Hell?

And what is this about “email, Facebook, MySpace, and other now-routine diversions”? Perhaps Zaitchik’s real target is information overload. Twitter is just the latest in a string of enticing but dangerous technological diversions, and the sustained weight of all that distraction is too much burden for any human to bear. Maybe he isn’t aware that many see an impending fight between Facebook and Twitter, or that MySpace is fast becoming passe, indicating that perhaps only a finite number of huge social networks can coexist.

These rivalries are beside the point, though. Ultimately we all make our own decisions about whether a particular technology is useful or a waste of time. If email, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, YouTube, and the rest are taking up too much of your time, maybe the problem isn’t with the tools.

Image Credit: Ravens’ Duet by Ron Mead. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.