I’m stuck at Tweed Airport in New Haven, so I just thought that I’d take advantage of the free Wi-Fi to use one new genre/platform (the blog) to comment on another (Twitter). This Brainstorm blogger doesn’t get the entire Twitter craze. Can somebody please explain it to me?
I actually had a lively conversation about this with a roomful of ethnographic researchers just over an hour ago (at a Yale University conference honoring the 35th Anniversary of Carol Stack’s canonical response to the demonization of poor black families, All Our Kin). The discussion was during a lunch-time workshop on “Media and Ethnography,” a workshop I rushed out of after it was over (so that I could catch a flight that I didn’t know was already canceled). Ugh!
But I was telling them that even as someone interested in studying (and using) new media technology, I didn’t understand why Twittering was a thing that has become so conspicuous and seemingly ubiquitous. And so quickly. I mean, I didn’t even know about Twitter at the start of the year, and already places like CNN are Twittering folks left and right. (Indeed, I admittedly don’t even know how “the techno-natives” actually make a verb out of the word “Twitter.”)
If I get it right, Twitters are short notes (under 100 characters) that are sent to “subscribers” that have signed up to follow a particular Twitterer (again, that might not be what the “locals” call it). So, in CNN’s case, it sounds like another way to send someone a traditional headline. Is it anything more than that? And don’t I already have the ability to take advantage of such a service via e-mails sent to my Blackberry?
Of course, the lure might be a little more powerful for fans of big-time celebrities. It might feel cool to get a Twitter from, say, Britney Spears or Ashton Kutcher or some other Hollywood superstar, and maybe especially because they are usually sending along some pithy sentence about the most mundane of everyday things (for instance, that they happen to be brushing their teeth and popping a zit). Or they could be writing whatever thought has just popped into their heads as a function of the TV show they’re currently watching or the meal they’re having. Ahston Kutcher actually out-Twittered CNN last month (by getting more subscribers to sign up for his Twitter over the course of a few days), and that was even with CNN constantly asking viewers to sign up as part of the light banter their announcers offered up between stories. Indeed, they even made their Twitter competition with Kutcher its own news story.
If I was a major Kutcher fan, I still don’t think that I’d add yet another layer to my already cluttered virtual existence. Why do other people bother?
Maybe you’d tell me that if I had subscribed to some of kind of U.S. Airways Twitter, I would have gotten a note that my plane was cancelled and that I was being put on a later flight. But that’s why I gave them my email address and cell phone number when I booked the flight. And they didn’t even get around to using either of those to reach me.
During the webinar I moderated yesterday on Obama’s first 100 days, maybe we could have set up a Twitter account that would have allowed viewers to send their questions to me directly via that medium. Maybe. But the 100-character limit would have been tough for a lot of the folks who sent in questions yesterday. And maybe that is really my problem with Twitter. Being a long-winded academic, I don’t know what anybody can say in 100 characters that wouldn’t demand further elaboration.
