Zero Sum Mind

Twitter reveals something I have always assumed.

If I were to suddenly gain the power to hear the thoughts of everyone in the world, most of what I would hear would be banal, uninteresting garbage and minutia about life.

But, if I had the power to filter out those thoughts and focus on specific people or topics – it would be amazing.

With Twitter’s search function and the bevy of widgets and Web sites out there parsing the data, you have the ability to do just that.

Here are some links to such:

Twitter search

Twitturly

Twitter visualizations

Hashtags

Twitterlocal

Popular links

Twitter hit critical mass this week, expanding at the rate of 1,382 percent, and it seems like a schism is upon us.

Mainstream news, eager to maintain relevancy, has embraced it, and a bevy of celebrities have made headlines with their Twitter antics.

Either you instantly love and/or understand it, or you instantly hate and/or have no idea why people like it.

Some of the love, and all of the hate is misguided, because people seem to forget one important fact – most people are dumb. Anything that reflects the collective unconscious is bound to reveal that.

That’s why I thought it was strange to see The Daily Show and Current.tv poke fun at the service, both in a way that seems uncharacteristically ignorant.

But, even on Digg, a supposed watering hole for the tech savvy, I’ve seen comments like this:

” ..all twitter users are retarded asshole douchebags.”

“ I cannot fathom why anyone would have even the remotest interest in such a pointless technology.”

“But how will everyone know, that I just ate a turkey sandwich? Open a blank word document write in it, and then save it. Every week delete it and start over!”

“I would say I hate twitter, but I’m still too busy trying to figure out what’s the fucking point of it.”

“More like the Internet toilet for micro-blogging diarrhea”

What these comments seem to assume is the people who use and like Twitter are rubes who can’t tell the difference between signal and noise.

This is an actual conversation between I had last week with my aunt-in-law, who is a professional journalist with decades of experience writing for print newspapers:

“Are you on Twitter?”

“Yeah, I really like it. I think it’s much better and more useful than Facebook can ever hope to be.”

“But, I don’t want to know what other people are doing every minute of the day.”

“That’s not the point of it, really. I mean, yes, there are people talking about cereal and their nipple rings and how much of an asshole their roomate it. But, still, that’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

She went on to tell me that all the young people at her paper were “madly in love with Twitter,” which drove her crazy because she doesn’t see the value in it.

Like a lot of people, she sees Twitter as just another Internet fad doomed to run out of steam in a few years.

That’s the problem with social media. So far, they follow a predictable pattern – birth, explosion, stagnation, death.

At first, early adopters go crazy, then everyone else joins – including your boss and ex wife. Once there are millions of users, everyone gets bored with the service or uncomfortable, which happens right as the ads start to make the place seem tacky. All at once, something that used to seem like an important part of daily life gets abandoned by early disposers, and the cycle begins again.

Social networks and Web 2.0 toys come and go like hula hoops and slap bracelets, and I think many people are just plain tired of hearing about Twitter, so they see at as a passing thing.

For some reason though, I think Twitter may be different. Unlike Myspace and Facebook and America Online and Six Degrees and Friendster and Compuserve, Twitter isn’t a walled garden. It isn’t a destination. It isn’t a purely social medium.

Twitter is a delivery system for bursts of instantaneous info from anywhere you can carry a cell phone.

Twitter arose not from social networks or blogs, it arose from the evolution of information transfer tools like the telegraph – telephone – email – chatroom – instant message – text message and so on.

As with the tools which came before, the delivery method is not the point – the content it.

Stupid, boring and dysfunctional people use Twitter in stupid, boring and dysfunctional ways, which is what has led to all the fear and loathing. Stupid, boring and dysfunctional people do the same thing with blogs and telephones, but they don’t make the tools stupid and boring.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is not about reconnecting with old friends and classmates. It isn’t about maintaining a database of contacts. It isn’t about creating a digital persona. It’s simply about trading information, some of it useful, lots of it emphera.

Twitter is searchable, malleable and doesn’t require the user to be near a computer.

This, above all else is what will give Twitter longevity and solidify what it provides as a part of our daily lives.

The idea of human RSS feeds is something that is never going to go away now that it is out there. Not everyone will participate, but enough people will that the society, culture, civilization itself will be affected.

Already, I check the trending topics every day. I search when a breaking story hits the Web. I have friends who participate in makeshift chatrooms during television shows built from hashtags. People use Twitter to share a moment, and then move on.

Just like social networking Web sites, its function may dissolve into part of what we think the Web should provide. Just about every site out there now offers some sort of social interaction between users.

Eventually, the idea of Facebook and others will seem silly as the social aspect of the Web becomes ubiquitous and expected wherever we go online.

Blogs changed the way we looked at our shared human experience. Twitter, or something similar will do the same as just one more supplement to our interaction and communication.

Link to Daily Show clip

Link to Digg debate

Link to Current.tv clip