Twitter Tangent
[I haven't updated in a while, mostly because I've not watched much anime lately. I'll try to get some real updates in here soon. For now, enjoy this rant.]
I can’t remember when I first heard of twitter, or when I first looked at it. I’d guess a couple years ago for the former, a year or less for the latter. It wasn’t until October that I actually got involved with the site. I originally joined twitter just to see what the appeal of it was. For a while, I was left wondering. But as I started following more people, and even got a few followers, I started to get it.
At first I assumed that twitter was a passing craze(much unlike hakuna matata). It didn’t seem substantial. To follow along with a conversation on twitter, you needed to either be following the people talking, or look through their twitter pages. That seemed like such a hassle. Further, what was the point of micro-blogging when people can just do real blogs? At first glance, twitter appears to be a poorly thought out cross between blogging and communicating directly. Perhaps that was the goal(not the poorly part, obviously). However, twitter is something different.
Twitter is like natural communication. If you take away the internet, phones, books, everything but people; communication is direct comment and response. You find people of similar mindsets or likes/dislikes, and you communicate with them. The more charismatic and ambitious of us speak to large groups. But it all comes down to one person stating something and others responding.
Just like natural communication, twitter forms communities. Groups. Cliques. Unlike natural communication, the barrier between these groups/cliques/communities is so small that relevant information flows over at rapid speeds. News can reach all of twitter in an hour.
Perhaps the key difference between natural communication and twitter is twitter’s lack of geographic limitations. Now your search for kinship can include people from all across the world. Now discussions can include people with very different views on a subject, totally different native languages, and completely different cultures. Now the internet comes closer to natural communication than ever before.
