adambohannon

I feel compelled, in light of recent events, to attempt to say something constructive about Twitter.  After being recently Oprah-ed, Twitter has been thrust into the purview of public knee-jerk criticism—and everyone’s got an opinion.  I won’t deny my own skepticism when I signed up over a year ago.  It smacked of narcissism, and in many ways it still does, but to stop here is to miss the point.  It takes only minor persistence to see past the deluge of quotidian updates to the tool’s real value.  But first, it’s important to understand something about how the internet is changing the information game and in turn reshaping the social landscape in a way that makes social tools like Twitter very, very important.

The internet, through democratizing the means of production and distribution, has contributed to an information explosion unrivaled in human history.  In effect, anyone with internet access and a laptop can become their own media outlet and this new capacity, characterized by the dissolution of boundaries, has vastly augmented the amount of information available for consumption.  We’ve ridden this tsunami of information into the 21^st century and as a result, to borrow terminology from Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail, our culture of hits has been submerged in a sea of niches.  For instance, big-box stores like Blockbuster, limited by the economics of the physical world that necessitates a focus on DVDs that draw large crowds, are being out-competed by online businesses like Netflix who exploit the internet environment of networked and abundant information to circumvent the inconveniences (i.e. high-costs) of shelf space, a practice that favors niches (as well as hits).  Now that obscure foreign flick you’ve been trying to find is literally at your fingertips, as well as thousands of others.  When the cost of shelf space is virtually zero and your supply is infinite the issue isn’t what you carry, but how you organize it—hence the advanced filtering and recommendation tools used by almost all successful online retailers.  User ratings on everything from consumer products to blog posts (and even blog comments) help us determine what’s important and what’s not.  These filters tap the wisdom of crowds, and it is this wisdom that will become more and more crucial to our information consumption habits.  This, of course, is only one example of a broader phenomenon.  But it’s useful in illustrating the basic economics of the internet and how it is allowing new kinds of communities to form by enabling people to connect in novel ways.

Enter Twitter.  A simple service that allows you to send updates of up to 140 characters.  Seemingly useless until juxtaposed to the information problem briefly outlined above.  Critics question why we should be interested in the mundane details of someone else’s life, glossing over, or simply not seeing, how such a tool is important to us as we navigate this expanding terrain of information.  Like many, if not all, online social networks, Twitter is interest-based and user-driven.  This is made possible by the internet’s corrosive effect on boundaries.  One allowance is the transcendence of the limitations of geographical proximity which vastly expands our spheres of influence (SOI being both who we may influence and who may influence us in return).  It sounds elitist, but essentially we can handpick who we want to associate with, more so than we could in the physical world (e.g. think about those people at work you can’t stand but have to for the sake of your job…).  So, frankly, if we are complaining about someone updating about what they had for lunch that day it’s no one’s fault but our own.  We have the choice to not, in Twitter parlance, follow them.  And if said person’s updates don’t venture much from the mundane, I’d recommend it.  It’s all about finding a balance of signal to noise, and this person is pure noise.

Twitter provides us with a tool to harvest the best of the web.  By following people who share my interests (anthropology, technology, art, social media, dub music, etc.) and who put out more signal than noise I effectively create a tribe of information-gatherers that, through their daily browsing habits, filter the abundance of information on the web so I don’t have to.  If you take a peek at my Twitter feed, it’s full of posts, many containing very valuable links to various sources, by professionals and enthusiasts from a myriad of fields relevant to my life.  I can’t tell you how valuable their contributions have been not only to my research but my personal repertoire of knowledge.  And in return for their efforts, I try to reciprocate as often as possible when I come across interesting information during my own browsing because the other side to this coin is people also follow me based on our corresponding interests.  So, in the end what we have is all of us working together to organize and filter the web in ways relevant to each of us.  A very important and necessary task.

Aside from Twitter’s information-harvesting potential, it also has tremendous implications for democracy and civil action.  In a country that has little backbone for political activism and a grotesque obsession with celebrities, I can see how we might fail to grasp this point.  But as we’ve seen, Twitter, like many social media, are born of and survive out of necessity.  And these two things need not be commensurate.  Twitter may have been born of a perceived need of web-goers to broadcast their personal lives in order to derive some sense of self-importance.   But recent demonstrations in Moldova (more here) transcend this cult-of-celebrity explanation.  Facilitated by Twitter and mobile phones, thousands of people organized to protest the results of April’s parliamentary election, accused of vote-rigging that ultimately kept the incumbent communist party in power for a third consecutive term.  In December 2008, spontaneous protests in Greece were organized in similar fashion.  Closer to home, anti-war activists in San Francisco sent Twitter updates from their phones to coordinate protests against the war in Iraq.  Twitter provides a channel for activists to communicate largely out of view of the police.  And though authorities are increasingly becoming privy to these new technologies and starting to monitor them during such outbreaks of civil unrest, they enable people to organize so quickly that there’s not much police can do to stop them.  They don’t call them flashmobs for nothing.  What’s more, not only does Twitter coupled with mobile technology allow people to organize more effectively, it also, in effect, turns everyone into embedded journalists who can relay information as it unfolds to the blogosphere.  Citizen journalism at its finest.  We are witnessing the emergence of what Evgeny Morozov calls the “networked protest.”  His reference includes much more than Twitter and mobile phones (you might remember the world-wide protest against Scientology organized through all kinds of networked media), but for my meager argument for the importance of Twitter the terminology is important as it highlights a future that’s already here.  We’d be smart to heed its arrival.

To conclude, I think the issue clouding our understanding of tools like Twitter is purpose.  Twitter might seem absurd if you have no reason to use it.  Of course it’s not worth anyone’s time to sit and watch the redundant details of someone’s daily routine unfold (curiously, though, when such things are broadcast on TV they pull huge audiences…).  I would argue, however, that if you spend any amount of time cruising the internet on a daily basis, you can leverage Twitter to your advantage.  You’d cut down on your idle browsing time and increase the value of your online experience by siphoning off the best of the web that’s relevant to your interests.  Instead of lamenting the confusion caused by too much information, we need to take initiative in filtering it.  And we have the tools to do so.  Search Twitter for topics of interest.  Or do a search for your favorite authors, enthusiasts, or news outlets.  You might be surprised by what you find.  It takes only a moment of critical thinking to decide how you can leverage these new tools to your advantage.  And if you can’t come up with anything, then maybe it’s not for you.  But I’d encourage you to at least ask Google first—because I’m sure someone else already has.

Tagged: activism, filtering, social media, technology, twitter