The first thing Twitter asks you when you log in from your smartphone or iPad is, "What are you doing?" The answer to this simple question is at the core of this social network and micro blogging application. Launched in July 2006 by a 10-person start-up called Obvious, Twitter got its name when its makers liked the sound of its definition, "a short inconsequential burst of information" and "chirps from birds". It is the perfect name. My favorite collective noun for birds by the way is “a charm of goldfinches”.
"Twitterers" or "tweeters" send and receive short messages whimsically called "tweets". Tweets circulate among networks of friends, which is unlike text messages. You can also choose to receive the tweets of people you find interesting. Searchable Hash tags (“#”) are used to collate tweets regarding the hashed topic. This means that a user can view the thoughts of all other users who have tweeted on this “hash tagged” topic without having to follow them in the first place.
Twitter reportedly reached a hundred million users this week. In a day 50 million active users send out 230 million tweets. Ranging from "Hello I'm in the loo" to pictures and news articles, haikus and songs on the ukulele, words of wisdom, the wide-ranging abundance of information on Twitter is, for lack of a better word, amazing. Some tweets are inane, some are eye-openers. Popular tweeters to follow include novelist Neil Gaiman @neilhimself and President Obama @barackobama. And with traditionally only 140 characters for you to form your tweets with, it takes a certain amount of skill to formulate your thoughts without irritating the heck outta people.
For me, the time when Twitter reached critical mass was when Ashton Kutcher @aplusk hit a million users in 2009 live on CNN. This showed that Twitter had hit the mainstream.
Twitter has had its fair share of ridicule, derided as the latest in time-wasting devices the most common of them. Lady Gaga @ladygaga wears the current crown for having most followers at 13,242,558 million last I checked. There are funny twitter feeds on anyone famous like @thequeen a parody account of the Queen of England. @darthvader, comes up with things like, “I like my Force like I like my toast, a little on the Dark Side”.
But its use in Iran in the wake of the contentious presidential election in June 2009 to organize protests and disseminate information in the face of a news media crackdown brought it new respect. It has been credited, some say to excess, for helping to bring about the so-called “Arab Spring” of this year.
It has had its cultural moments. For example, the guy who live tweeted the raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan a few months ago. He lived in a house without a television and got all his news and contact with the outside world on his pc and laptop. And he could tweet, right in the middle of Abbottabad, the earliest (accidental) report the world had on the raid that killed Bin Laden.
It is accessible wherever you have an Internet connection and with the advent of Wi-Fi and 3G it pretty much means that these days, you can be continuously connected to Twitter. You only really need a smart phone to theoretically be in touch with the thoughts of 100 million users around the world. It is not just whether you want or need to know whether Lady Gaga has just used the toilet, but since everyone is connected by various degrees of separation news, views and information can spread and disseminate through Twitter and across the world very quickly. It is like an enormous, global cocktail party.
This virtual party has become tangible to commerce. Twitter has been used as a platform by various businesses for customer service or PR, to push sales to their followers or those they follow. Newspapers too have jumped on the bandwagon, providing daily updates on the news, engaging their followers (previously known as readers). This paper has recently come up with its own Twitter feed to sound out the views of its readers.
So far the chirping has been harmonious. As with everything, I hope that Twitter won't become too polluted with commerce and inappropriate behavior. There is always a risk, once things reach a critical mass, of fraud, scams and hoaxes. Just like certain well-known message boards of the past, twitter feeds may be subject to the manipulation of views, the distortion of the truth. Insidious little dishonesties can bring down communities or lessen the value of a useful tool.
That at the end of the day is all that it is - a communication tool for broadcasting and receiving information. In these days of a multiplicity of view points, some valid, some subject to manipulation, some fraudulent; what is important for individuals is to arrive at their own position, their own point of view. Individuals need to locate and develop their own moral compass in order to decide individually what is right or wrong. It is thus up to the individual to make Twitter their own, either “a parliament of owls" a “murder of crows”, or anything in between.
@emmagoodegg
Illustration by Cuboi Art.
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