The Guardian - Life is tweet: How the Twitter family infiltrated our cultural world
Twitter is rapidly growing as a way to create a 'watercooler' of the 21st century. While some like Tim Ferris (author of the 4-hour work-week) sneer at it as a time-waster, it has become a new way to spread information, news, and, probably soon, to advertise, promote, and become a trend-setter. Article lists some places where Twitter has gone: TV shows have created twitter accounts based around the shows' plots, celebrities of all sorts (film, writers, artists, politicians) write to their fans, companies use them to monitor and promote their image.
2 comments:
Well if the incredibly efficient 4-hr work week says nay to Twitter, I'm inclined to agree.
Also, what's with the current insistence on laziness in language -- Twitter Virgins = "twirgins"? This just makes everyone sounds like imbiciles who can't take an extra second to get words out clearly. I can understand such ellisions in military situations, but nothing on twitter is in the interest of national security.
Also, I'm glad, even though it only happened in parenthesis, that Patalay was keen enough to point out that tweet "followers" aren't truly having conversations with celebrities. This is not 2-sided communication; tweets are just the rantings and minutiae of crazies on soapboxes whose 'end of the world' signs happens to interest you.
How is it that anyone really has the time to listen?
I'm always flabbergasted at how divisive Twitter can be. People don't regularly scoff at texting, or cell phones, or CB radios, yet Twitter is somehow an assault on the sensibility of communication.
I use Twitter to keep track of people I otherwise wouldn't be able to. Be it a journalist who's been laid off or a friend in the town over.
Things happen when discourse is taken as opt-in content. If my friend says "At the Haymarket feeling kind of lonely", I can show up if I want coffee, or not show up, and there are no hard feelings. It's not as if he called and I had to reject him.
Twitter acknowledges that people are objects orbiting their work week, and when happenstance allows those bodies to collide, so be it, but if a connection is missed, there is no resulting friction.
In response to R_J_T's comment on the foreshortening of words, this happens everywhere; language is a constantly developing system, and new words are created all the time, especially when you have a 140 character limit.
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