Well, I’ve dived into the world of Twitter. My original intent was just to create another option to alert people to my infrequent updates, but I ended up using the site frequently. You can find me here. My main account will include stuff about both my main online interests (film and urban planning) as well as my various other obsessions.
As to my impressions of Twitter itself after a couple of weeks of using it – well, its a strange beast. Obviously, given I’ve taken it up with some regularity, I understand the appeal. Basically, it’s not so much a social networking site as a kind of rest-stop for tired bloggers (this is why the description of it as a micro-blogging site is much more accurate than lumping it in with things like Facebook or MySpace as a social networking site). Certainly the 140 character limit on posts seems liberating compared to the drudgery of maintaining a webpage or blog. When audiences expect sites to update with new content at least daily, that’s a huge demand on the author; 140 characters allows for the faster turnover without the chore factor. Twitter is basically reducing our expectations of on-line content so that they better align with expectations about how fast sites should update.
I understand that sense of relief: giving up frequently does feel good. The problem is that I like long posts. They’re torture to produce (I struggled with my recent essay on Richard Lowenstein’s films for the best part of a month, for example), so the instant gratification of Twitter is more fun in that respect. But I also take a lot of pride in the better longer pieces I’ve done for this site, and enjoy reading other online writers who produce really good long format writing. One of the key advantages of the internet is being freed from the tyrannies of space restrictions that apply in other media. Yet that freedom comes at a cost of an expectation of immediacy that I’ve always struggled with: I like that my page is centered on longer, more analytical and reflective pieces than I could ever publish elsewhere, but visitors have expectations of timeliness and frequency that are hard to reconcile with such writing. The internet can accommodate unusal depth and unprecedented speed, but for writers it’s hard to produce both at once: I’ve always chosen the former. So while I can see the niche Twitter fills, for someone like me, it seems like a cure for the wrong disease.
One answer to this, of course, is that Twitter imposes discipline absent from the rest of the write-as-much-as-you-want internet. There is of course much to admire in brevity, and I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said much of my writing could have been improved with a few hundred less words. But discipline doesn’t spring from an arbitrary limit: it is something that must be imposed by an author within whatever format they are working. What Twitter delivers is just a constraint; and within that constraint it is hard to deliver anything beyond a pithy one liner.(This is why nobody says Hamlet would have been so much better had Shakespeare had the discipline to keep it to 140 characters). Plus the discipline isn’t there anwyay, since posts get broken up across multiple tweets, or the format is used to link off-Twitter to spots where the idea can be expressed properly.
The other, final, weird thing about Twitter is the attitude amongst many of its users that it is somehow better than Facebook. This mystifies me not because I’m a huge fan of Facebook – I do like it for the most part, but also recognise its bad aspects – but because Twitter generally has most of the bad aspects of Facebook only more so. Facebook is criticised for encouraging stalking of people you don’t really know well in the real world: but Twitter is almost nothing else, since you don’t (usually) need permission to follow people and it’s considered perfectly normal to follow a bunch of minor celebrities rather than using it to keep in touch with genuine real-world friends. Facebook gets mocked for its allegedly clunky interface: yet Twitter’s actual website is almost non-functional and it really needs third party applications (either on the PC or phones) to make much sense of the service. Facebook has advertising: yet Twitter has for more spam and dummy accounts. And Facebook gets mocked for the non-stop blather of inane staus updates: yet on Twitter there’s no shame in posting multiple tweets a day, meaning that the stream of random comments truly does become overwhelming. All that without the redeeming aspects like, say, seeing new photos of your friends’ children.
Harumph. Rant over. What was I saying?
Oh, that’s right. Follow me on Twitter – it’s awesome!