Misadventures in Micro-Blogging: The Real Problem with Twitter

New media doomsayers and cultural critics love to quote Henry Thoreau’s famous quip on the first transoceanic telegraph line: “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic . . . ; but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Face it: Henry Thoreau doesn't care what you're doing.

As much as anything else, this shows that Thoreau was a classic wet blanket when it came to technology and that, really, he should’ve enjoyed the relative quiet while it lasted. That bit of proto-celebrity gossip, at least, had an element of human drama. Now substitute Nicole Ritchie for Princess Adelaide and “wants a burrito” for “has the whooping cough,” and you’ve drawn a tidy line of precipitously declining urgency from the content of the 19th century telegraph to that of Twitter.

But that’s nothing new. Exhuming Thoreau also proves that since the 1860s, every new development in information technology has been tarred by one authority or another as the one that was finally going to complete American culture’s nosedive into miscellany and irrelevance. So if we’re going to join that chorus re:Twitter, let’s at least recognize that we’re more or less certain to be proved either A) wrong or B) right in a way that’s so historically watered-down and redundant as to not really matter.

Which is not to say that Twitter should be uncritically embraced. It shouldn’t, but not for the reason most folks like to cite (i.e., “it’s making us vapid”). No, ma’am. That’s not they way it works. Twitter doesn’t make us vapid–doesn’t sap our inherent creativity and beam a laser of dullness into our captive minds. Quite the contrary: by being so wonderfully participatory and democratic, Twitter gives us all more chances than we’ve ever had to broadcast our (pre-existing) vapidity. The problem isn’t just Twitter. It’s us, and if critics want to quote something to the correct effect, the old joke about smart fools vs. dumb fools serves better than Thoreau.

A smart fool lets everyone wonder if he’s an idiot; a dumb fool opens his mouth and confirms it.

Subscribe to the Nicole Ritchie Feed.

And in its particulars, Twitter probably sets us up to look like really dumb fools. On the one hand, the format plays to the universal thirst for attention, prompting users for constant reports on their life’s hourly progresses (or lack thereof). And on the other, Twitter requires that those reports be very, very terse. This setup imposes one kind of restraint (140 characters per post) while completely eliminating another (the previously limited number of opportunities in a day to grandly announce what you’re doing/thinking/eating), and the resulting tension creates the real Twitter problem, as most of us just don’t look that good in a barrage of quips.

By way of analogy, the genius of the haiku and the sonnet isn’t that they’re short; it’s in the fact that they force the writer to be judicious and the reader to be imaginative. And there’s no shame in admitting that the sonnet, as a format, just isn’t for everyone. Particularly when you’re churning them out day after day. A Shakespeare might keep the quality relatively high, but the rest of us over time are going to look more and more like really bad poets.

Or in the case of Twitter (where, mercifully, most aren’t writing in verse), the constant temptation / pressure to produce new micro-blog updates eventually brings out the boring, banal, and unappealing in just about everyone. And this, I think, suggests the ultimate truth of Twitter: People are more interesting when you don’t know everything about them.

~ by misadventurer on May 25, 2009.