In defence of Twitter

image credit: It’s just a robin, me’nthedog

From all of the available evidence, you’d have to conclude that Twitter is a frightening little tool. Here’s an extract from an article written by Barbara Ellen in the Guardian at the end of March:

‘You can’t blame “yoof” for this one. People into Twitter are the same people who fell for MySpace, in turn the people who used to project their holiday snaps on to walls at dinner parties. Every generation throws them up – painful, self-promoting bores, uber-narcissists to the nth degree, so fascinated by their every dreary, pointless move they can’t believe we’re not.’

We should all commend Ms Ellen for having squeezed every drop of vitriol that she possesses into a single paragraph, but why, you might ask, did she bother? It’s not as if people have been sandpapering under her armpits or clattering saucepans on her head. No. There’s obviously something about Twitter which is much worse than that.

Twitter, for the benefit of those readers that have been living in a cave for the past year, is an online social networking tool – the latest achievement of web 2.0 that has already given us Flickr, My Space, Facebook and Spotify. It allows you to publish short updates of 140 characters or less, and enables you to reply to questions and link to stories. It’s a deceptively simple tool that was used to great effect by Barack Obama as part of his election strategy last year, and ever since hundreds of thousands of others have joined in his slipstream, causing its number of overall users to leap swiftly upwards week after week ever since.

The golden-age of the uber-narcissist

I’ve long been of the opinion that there are three attitudes that one can take to new technology. Firstly you can ignore it and hope that it goes away. The second, and by far the most British way, is to laugh at it, claim that it is inadequate, infantile and nothing better than an idle waste of your precious time. And thirdly, you can try to understand it, and – if you can – use it.

I’m not advocating Twitter for everyone, but I’ve seen enough of it to state that it is useful. You can use it as a news feed, as a forum for discussion, a medium for connecting with interesting people and a way of promoting your own material. Twitter is the outgoing, liberal sibling of Facebook. Your network is not merely confined to old school and university friends, but can be handpicked to suit whatever you want. In my case I’ve journalists, photographers, charity workers, politicians and comedians that I can listen to and learn from whenever I switch it on.

But for Ellen these are no redeeming qualities. For her Twitter is just another symptom of ‘the golden age of the uber-narcissist’. It’s another nail in the coffin of the private self; a further silly Internet tool with a ludicrous name that shamefully encourages us all to broadcast the minutiae of our lives. It’s the most annoying thing since Facebook, and if we don’t rise above it we’re all going to be rightfully damned forever to weekends spent worrying about our friend list, our follower count, and smiling wildly into the lenses of digital cameras, in desperate attempts to make it appear as if we are having a better time of life than we actually are.

Of course, there is more than a grain of truth in this. I fondly remember growing up in the 1990s, an age when holiday photos were entombed forevermore in leather albums on a bookshelf in the hall and not open for the world to see; when it was possible to lose touch with people you didn’t much like; and when you had to plead with your parents to get your girlfriend added to the ‘Friends and Family’ list, so that you could call her excitably at seven o’clock – on the dot.

It was a less excitable era, before the arrival of mobile communication, and when you arranged to meet a friend in the park with a football at half past one, you wouldn’t think for a moment that they wouldn’t be there. And if they weren’t you’d know to ring the police because they’d either been abducted on the High Street or their house had just burnt down.

These digital times

But society has changed. We’re now more open, more capricious; we’ve grown adept at broadcasting ourselves and cultivating our very own images. With nowhere left to go, capitalism has turned the self, the very last private frontier, into a commodity. Some people might not like this and others might not understand it, but it has happened none the less. The 1990s, with its squat, bottle-green telephones and finger dial faces seems a very distant place indeed.

The fate of humankind is such that every generation, in turn, is saddled with its very own revolution; and just as the ‘60s saw a cultural revolution, the noughties have experienced a digital equivalent. Little more than five years ago there was no such thing as Facebook, Skype, My Space, You Tube, Blip, Spotify or Twitter. Now their places in our world are so assured that they have entered our language as verbs: to facebook, to skype and to tweet.

Of the lot, Twitter is the most slippery: the most difficult to grasp, and the one with most potential. It’s particularly favoured by the media, and with newspapers suffering catastrophic declines in readership, journalists have been embracing Twitter in their thousands as an alternative medium. They’ve dubbed it a digital news wire, a forum for debate, a lead generator, a hotbed of citizen journalism, and faster than anything that ever existed before.

In November last year news of the Mumbai attacks was broken and tracked on Twitter; the iconic image of the US Airways aeroplane sprawled in the Hudson was published there just moments after its crash; a year before all of this, a prolific blogger named Robert Scoble smashed a digital boundary when he ‘live tweeted’ the birth of his son Milan online; and, just two months ago, Sky News appointed the world’s very first Twitter correspondent. What the future is going to look like, nobody knows.

It’s easy for people like Barbara Ellen to sneer, caricaturing Twitter as nothing more than a drab hangout of restless narcissists; but what are the real motivations behind the bile? Is it an underhand desire to suggest that their own lives are filled solely with high thoughts and meaningful actions? Could they be prompted by fear? Thinly veiled admissions that the media is no longer the exclusive fiefdom of the educated and powerful? Or is it just worth remembering that these were probably the very same people who were complaining about the introduction of email in the 1990s, the calculator a decade before that, and were probably carping away about the dangers of The Beatles in 1963.

Either way the world’s changing, 140 characters at a time.