"I think the real power of Twitter is its ability to channel over
different mediums at the user's whim. IM, SMS, email, and the web
are just transports as far as Twitter is concerned."
Says Alex Payne, right after the part where he admits that Ruby is slow, something else that's been bothering me instinctively. But this is interesting. It's what I was trying to get developed at CCI for the longest time. The thing is, I envisioned it differently. I mean, at its core it's the same, but the human-computer-human interface feels a little different to me.
In my view:
1. I want to send a message out to a bunch of friends, or whoever's listening.
2. I write the message (short) with whatever keypad I have handy (phone, computer) and more importantly, whichever one is online.
3. I label it "mundane but worth saying just for kicks" (ie, Third Class).
4. I send it.
5. The message gets to the people based on what priority they have declared at the moment, or whatever the default preference they have set for that time of day/week (ie, I'm at work, route all classes of message to my inbox, or I'm running about, route all 1st class messages to my mobile).
I think the last part, step 5, is where Twitter is a little opaque. And I realize it would be a lot of hassle to "classify" your texts or posts, esp from your phone, but there's plenty of room between "OMG I want to know every single thing you send out at any given moment" and "mundane but worth saying just for kicks to whomever is out there". (I just stopped following Darth Vader after one too many dorky dork posts.) Should be able to, on the user side, change the reception more easily. Like "Hold all my calls, I'm blogging!"
4 comments:
I'm going to play devil's advocate here and pose the question as to whether all these thecnological advances that have made communication faster, easier and more accessible are actually improving the quality of our communication with each other. OK yes, it's great that I can now talk to my mom for free on the weekends, but do I really need to tell a dozen of my friends what I'm doing all the time? All I'm questioning is whether a sense of thoughtfulness and deliberateness in what we say to each other has been run over by how much we can say. Jane Austen's characters would be losing their minds.
“We may some day click off arguments on a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash register.”
-- As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, 1945
But really, I think, sociologically, culturally, what we're coming up against is...what happens when you can a) easily transcribe your thoughts, b) save them to the "ether", c) and in doing so, broadcast your thoughts to the world, all literally with the push of a button?
We all need to be journalists. We all need to be editors. The problem is, we're also our own publishers and readership. And, we all want to be famous.
FAME: Right, it confuses the line between private and public, and that has resulted in some really interesting as well as profoundly banal phenomena. At a certain point you could track the journey of Esme Tseng (a Chinese-American teen who stabbed her mother to death) on her many blogs, until the officials locked them down. Of course that is a case of incidental fame -- her matricide made her publications retroactively valuable as a tracking of her narrative. The more conscious desire for fame in the digital age may necesitate the purposeful invention of avatars, a persona, a body double. Like when you represent yourself on a social network, how close to really portraying yourself are you? How long can you fulfill your fans' expectations as Darth Vader? Do you think that maybe we will continue to split/create personalities, adding to the lateral explosion of information and objects and phenomena? Like why am I writing this comment instead of talking to you in person about this? These questions disturb me.
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