What is Twitter?

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Twitter is. How do you explain it to people, and just what the hell do people do with it anyway? Whatever it is, is there any value to it, or is it just the next goofy thing to do online?

Not that long ago, I wrote an article entitled Why Twitter is Doomed to Failure, and the general idea there was that there isn’t really a good vehicle for letting people know what it is. I don’t think Twitter is doomed, of course, but I do think that there needs to be a lot more explanation. The simple fact is that people don’t get Twitter, and there just isn’t any way to explain it in a soundbite that makes any sense.

The point was made pretty clearly recently by an article on Times Online by Andy Pemberton. Titled A Load of Twitter, the article basically rambled uselessly from a completely uninformed and erroneous point of view (and frankly was written absolutely disingenuously, with no other purpose than to cause a backlash), but a point of view that is easy to understand. The article might as well have been titled, “I don’t get why people use Twitter, and here are a couple of other people who don’t either,” and for as much information and insight as it passed on, it could have just stopped at the title.

We know you don’t Andy (wink wink). We’re working on it.

Now, just for the sake of clarity on where points of view and statements come from, I’m not a psychologist. I actually was a semester shy of such an undergraduate degree when I changed my major to Philosophy…which I do have a degree in… which I guess makes me a philosopher (and poor planner) in some technical sense. I also have a degree in Secondary Education… which makes me a teacher in some technical sense.

I mention this, for a specific reason, and because the above article contains quotes from a clinical psychologist and cognitive neuropsychologist. I just want to repeat – I am not a psychologist.

Here are the two quotes from that article.

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

“We are the most narcissistic age ever,” agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

Now, here’s my response to these responses – neither of these people is actually very familiar with Twitter at all, have very little if any real experience using it, and have only a passing understanding of the theory at best.

Yeah, I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve read just about every book you care to name on the subject, and I’m pretty confident these are not the views of people who know Twitter. They sound very much like what you might expect from a psychologist with a cursory glance at the general idea. Especially, oh let’s say if someone went to Twitter.com and saw the tiny paragraph that explains that Twitter gives people the outlet for answering the question, “What are you doing?” And, let’s say someone (let’s call him Andy) gave you a very roughshot overview of Twitter, describing it as, “A bunch of people type in what they’re doing and follow other people so they can read what they’re doing.”

Then you’d be very likely to get that reaction from any psychologist.

That’s not remotely what Twitter is.

First off, Twitter is something different for absolutely every person who uses it. It is what you personally make it, and it can be just about anything. Statements like, “Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity,” are already clearly uninformed statements. As one comment on the article pointed out, you might as well say the same of using the telephone, or email. And, I don’t mind adding, you might as well throw in simply talking at all. Communicating in any fashion is mostly what you make it… unless, of course, you are working from the erroneous assumption that Twitter is nothing more than saying, “eating a sandwich now,” into a stream of millions of others who are doing the same.

What Twitter is, is at once very complex and very simple. In one sense, it very simply is the internet, or at least a solution to a major stumbling block in the internet’s existence. The internet is great. Everything at your fingertips. But, it’s all out there. Imagine walking into a room with literally everything in it. Sure, you could correctly say, “I have everything here,” but who wants everything? And who wants it all just sitting there?

So, these great search options come along, and now when you’re looking for something, you can easily sift through the everything and find what you want right now. That’s great. But, does it actually fit precisely with what we’re looking for? Think about it for a second. That old Encyclopedia is sitting right there with a lot of handy information I can find pretty easily. At times that works out great, but is that really… “what we do?” Not hardly.

We get newspapers, we watch the news, we watch programs on television on interesting (yet somewhat general) subjects. We talk to our friends who say, “Have you seen this?” We subscribe to magazines on topics we’re interested in. We also mash it together, to use the online vernacular. We like a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of news, and a little bit of chatting, and swirl it around. I could go on forever, but I think you get the point.

Basically, what we generally do, when we can find the option, is not described well as, “going to get information.” We want our information to come to us.

That’s what Twitter is, but very specifically in whatever way you personally choose for it to work.

You can follow a wide variety of news sources, and moreover “people in the know” on an amazing variety of subjects. You can follow Stephen Fry (everyone else does, you might as well), and a growing list of other celebrities. Then for a while you can play “is that really them” along with the rest of us, and have a bit of a laugh. You can follow experts on topics you like, and get updates to their blogs or websites, and you can see what they recommend to read elsewhere. It’s one thing to follow a blog on gardening to get that writer’s insights, but it is quite another to follow that gardener personally and have them also tell you what they’re reading or doing, or just what they found interesting somewhere on the web.

Of course, you can also follow people just because they seem like interesting people. Or, maybe someone is just good at finding things on the internet and pointing them out, and you actually find those recommendations interesting. You can, in a sense, just subscribe to their tastes.

But, is it interesting when someone Tweets, “This computer is pissing me off!” Does anyone actually care? Frankly, no. On the other hand, it isn’t interesting when my wife says it either, and I don’t know how much I can claim to really care. But, I listen to her say it. I listen to my friends say things like, “Have Red Sox tickets, gone til Thursday,” but I don’t really care (except insofar as it makes me want to say, “Bastard!”).

Here’s the funny thing that people who run with their immediate reactions to Twitter don’t take into consideration – my wife actually says other things. My friends say other things occasionally as well. The fact that we can point out the Tweet where some rock star said they were looking for their glasses does not mean we have thereby proven the uselessness of the thing. Again, I’m sure we might be able to demonstrate that someone has said that over a phone.

And yes, a lot of it is perhaps strange, and more difficult to attach “value” to in some objective sense. If I say I follow the New York Times, people can get that. If I say I run an entertainment-related blog and I subscribe to a lot of news sites within that industry, or other movie bloggers, people can get that pretty easily. You can even do pretty well telling people that you follow any of the wide variety of official company sites that now Twitter. Starbucks, JetBlue, and on and on. People can connect with the idea that certain people might want updates from certain companies. But, how do I explain following someone like @mickipedia with a straight face? Worse still, how do I explain arbitrarily following absolutely anyone she talks directly to (or @s)?

Trickier. Just for the sake of brevity, I’ll only say that @mickipedia is a young woman in Los Angeles who is involved in Roller Derby (hey, go find out who she is for yourself).

I follow her because she cracks me up, and I’m fairly (and I think legitimately) fascinated by the idea that there is just no way on earth that I would ever know who she was if it wasn’t for Twitter.

That’s really what Twitter is. As someone pointed out to me, it’s just a giant cocktail party, and everyone’s invited. You mingle around, and you hear someone say, “I write movie reviews.” Then you read their review, and you say, “hey, that’s pretty good, do you have a card?” Then someone says, “hey, I was reading this the other day, check this out,” and you say, “hey, that is interesting, if you find something else like that let me know.” And, you get their card. Then someone says, “hey, look what’s on the news,” and then you look, and you look down and you have a card. Then you say something rather clever, and a couple hundred people tap you on the shoulder… “do you have a card?”