Who Twitters?

by Brian on 01-09-2009

I’ve been trying to figure out who from my group of friends and “real life” acquaintances might want to start using Twitter. I got on it recently and I love it. (Actually, I tried it over a year ago and didn’t quite “get it” — not until after I’d been immersed more in the social mediasphere.) I’ve never found any more effective way to find people with the same interests (certainly not Facebook).

More encouraging than simply finding people with the same interests was the realization that most of the people I found are awesome — and I was even more surprised to notice that some of the people I found through different topics (including people I admired before following them on Twitter) were having conversations with each other, sharing knowledge between their respective domains.

Contrary to what I assumed, Twitter is very much alive with intellectual activity — or maybe creative is a better word. People on Twitter tend to have a genuine passion for learning, discovering, and creating new things. Something like Wikipedia isn’t as active because it’s all about describing things definitively, once-and-for-all: discussions aren’t free to veer off into generative new inquiries and insights. And it’s not like a Facebook or a MySpace, with comprehensive user profiles set up to represent people. On Twitter we’re represented by the last few things we said, so there are fewer inhibitions. If you’re afraid of saying something stupid — or if you did say something stupid — just keep posting tweets and pretty soon (maybe within minutes) it’ll be off the radar and long forgotten.

Now intuitively that doesn’t seem like a very productive way to generate ideas with real substance and integrity. It seems like it would just be a bunch of noise, with everyone trying to shout for attention. In some ways that’s true, but it neglects that fact that each of us as individuals tries to pull it all together to make it into something — to create something. We want to generate ideas with real substance and integrity… We want our lives to have real substance and integrity.

What makes this work on Twitter is us. We have to work to make it work for and by ourselves. There are no complex algorithms making recommendations (though some applications like that are available, mostly from independent developers): we have to do more of our own finding and filtering — more of our own thinking — than anywhere else on the web. More importantly, if you’re not saying anything, you essentially don’t exist on Twitter (unless you’re already well known and 20,000 people click “Follow” because they got a kick out of finding you there and hope you’ll say something interesting).

Here I’m happy to go to one of my favourite philosophers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, who wrote that we must continually make ourselves in every moment. More importantly, we have to constantly figure out who we are going to be (please pardon the use of “man”):

It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to “ideate” the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

I realized why many people aren’t suited for Twitter. It isn’t just about adopting technology and being social, it’s about being creative and dramatic — being willing to call attention to ourselves regularly throughout the day. We have to have something to say and believe it’s worth being heard. Most of it, on it’s own merits, is little more than arbitrary and indiscriminate noise. But altogether it’s a rich environment for cultivating one’s character and personal narrative in a truly vital and meaningful way.

Further reading: this Tim O’Reilly post puts it pretty well, and is largely responsible for getting me geared up to get back on Twitter after a failed start last year. If you want the Ortega reference I’m gonna make you work for it: i.e. leave a comment or contact me – maybe @brnfrnk.

Who Twitters?

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