Firstly let me clarify that this has been long due. That it has not seen the light of day can be attributed to various reasons, not least of which is paradoxically one of the things this post seeks to address. And thankfully, now that I've got my customary long sentence out of the way, I can get down to business.
Unless you've been living under a rock or, in massive over-preparation for 2012, in an ABC shelter, you cannot have missed the internet phenomenon that is Twitter. I was about to prefix that with 'latest' when I caught myself, realizing that in the digital world, Twitter is about as latest as the chubby Ronaldo is to football and the Pterodactyl is to the earth. Either way, your life has been touched by #twitter at least once. I am among the last of the muggles left in Twitter-warts magic school, simply failing to understand how a medium that needs such constant attention and allows no room for flowing, liberal prose could ever be such a popular medium of expression.
It's not that I don't like the concept itself, it's just that somehow I feel, it's no different from those big ol' public chat-rooms that Yahoo had. For me, twitter is like the Chennai Central station - as soon as I enter it, I just get swamped by this incessant buzz of chatter, each with their own voices and opinions and all talking at once. Similarly, most twitter conversations which go @reply after @reply after @reply seem like the chubby, late-middle-aged bureaucrat or businessman in a Safari next to you talking loudly into his phone forcing one side of the conversation completely upon you.
And what is this about joining the conversation. Most of the times the conversations fly by so thick and fast that I barely get to comprehend what's going on, let alone get a word in. Apparently there's 'clients' and 'apps' which can read your brain, paraphrase it in 140 characters, throw in a few links and hashtags and announce it to the world within 10 seconds. I, on the other hand, lose about 2 minutes just trying to see which @ I should reply to, and then thinking about the line which will best pack a 140-character punch. By then, the topic of discussion would have moved on entirely about thrice, rendering you clever, thoughtful and brilliant insights kinda 'old school'. Damn.
"If you know so much, you must be using it, Aha!" you say. I am, but it's mostly in such a passive state that bears in hibernation will have a longer timeline than mine. Mostly I'm just scared that I will break some unwritten rule in the flurry of all the @ and #s. Is it ok to address a guy you completely don't know as 'mate'? Should I ask for people's permission before @mentioning them? And seriously, what's the deal with celebrities?!! Questions to which deriving the answers from the iterations of my moral compass result in the same lack of alacrity as mentioned above. And on twitter, alacrity is everything.
As far as I see it, it has been most successful as a news dissemination medium, which is quite different from what it allegedly started out being. By the sheer strength of crowd-sourcing, it's been able to pull together stories from all over the world in a way no news agency can, and for that it works. Imagine a current affairs wikipedia, constantly edited and getting filled with some useful information by a modification of the Infinite Monkey theorem. And the power of customization letting you choose which parts of infinity you want to read, right here right now. Well, that's all just fair. I guess some of us would still like to wait for a more informed, thoughtful opinion in the next day's papers.
What do you think? Feel free to drop me a line on twitter @Duckyied and I'll be sure to get back to you. By 2013.
Or you can just leave a comment below.
Unless you've been living under a rock or, in massive over-preparation for 2012, in an ABC shelter, you cannot have missed the internet phenomenon that is Twitter. I was about to prefix that with 'latest' when I caught myself, realizing that in the digital world, Twitter is about as latest as the chubby Ronaldo is to football and the Pterodactyl is to the earth. Either way, your life has been touched by #twitter at least once. I am among the last of the muggles left in Twitter-warts magic school, simply failing to understand how a medium that needs such constant attention and allows no room for flowing, liberal prose could ever be such a popular medium of expression.
It's not that I don't like the concept itself, it's just that somehow I feel, it's no different from those big ol' public chat-rooms that Yahoo had. For me, twitter is like the Chennai Central station - as soon as I enter it, I just get swamped by this incessant buzz of chatter, each with their own voices and opinions and all talking at once. Similarly, most twitter conversations which go @reply after @reply after @reply seem like the chubby, late-middle-aged bureaucrat or businessman in a Safari next to you talking loudly into his phone forcing one side of the conversation completely upon you.
And what is this about joining the conversation. Most of the times the conversations fly by so thick and fast that I barely get to comprehend what's going on, let alone get a word in. Apparently there's 'clients' and 'apps' which can read your brain, paraphrase it in 140 characters, throw in a few links and hashtags and announce it to the world within 10 seconds. I, on the other hand, lose about 2 minutes just trying to see which @ I should reply to, and then thinking about the line which will best pack a 140-character punch. By then, the topic of discussion would have moved on entirely about thrice, rendering you clever, thoughtful and brilliant insights kinda 'old school'. Damn.
"If you know so much, you must be using it, Aha!" you say. I am, but it's mostly in such a passive state that bears in hibernation will have a longer timeline than mine. Mostly I'm just scared that I will break some unwritten rule in the flurry of all the @ and #s. Is it ok to address a guy you completely don't know as 'mate'? Should I ask for people's permission before @mentioning them? And seriously, what's the deal with celebrities?!! Questions to which deriving the answers from the iterations of my moral compass result in the same lack of alacrity as mentioned above. And on twitter, alacrity is everything.
As far as I see it, it has been most successful as a news dissemination medium, which is quite different from what it allegedly started out being. By the sheer strength of crowd-sourcing, it's been able to pull together stories from all over the world in a way no news agency can, and for that it works. Imagine a current affairs wikipedia, constantly edited and getting filled with some useful information by a modification of the Infinite Monkey theorem. And the power of customization letting you choose which parts of infinity you want to read, right here right now. Well, that's all just fair. I guess some of us would still like to wait for a more informed, thoughtful opinion in the next day's papers.
What do you think? Feel free to drop me a line on twitter @Duckyied and I'll be sure to get back to you. By 2013.
Or you can just leave a comment below.
