Two years ago I voiced my dislike of a certain social media, some things haven’t changed.
Bulletin Boards, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+. There has been an explosion of social sites in recent years. Some have grown into useful networks. Some have stayed as annoying as they were when they started. Some started out looking useful and morphed into less dynamic spaces. Some are very specific, some are wide open. It’s been an interesting evolution to watch and experiment with, and I often wonder where things will go from here. I got to thinking about this today when I discovered that a source of professional information, relevant to my work, that I was interested in keeping up on, was on Twitter and not mirrored on Facebook.
Way back when there were bulletin board services that kick started the whole forum-network thing. Then things opened up and people could set up their own webpages. MySpace was an early runner in the personalized networking space, but it was too mish-mashy. It was better than a build-it yourself website because it allowed people with no html skills to create a personalized space.
Facebook arrived in 2004 and blew MySpace out of the water. And it grew and changed and morphed into something that has drawn in over 800 million active users, and is still growing. More than 350 million people access Facebook using mobile devices. There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, objects, groups, events, community pages). The average user has 130 friend connections. That’s a lot of interaction and I’ve been surprised to discover recent friends that are friends of people I know and didn’t know they knew. Facebook has reduced the degrees of separation from six to two. I joined sometime in 2007.
Shortly after Facebook I stuck my nose into Flickr and DeviantArt. I fell off the DeviantArt wagon fairly quickly, it is a space better suited for artists. I was delving into photography and had discovered a world of like minded people, some of whom very quickly became online friends from around the globe, some of whom I was lucky enough to meet and enjoy their company in person (and I hope very much to do so again in the near future). Flickr is a wonderful space where the visual journeys of others can be shared, the wonders of the world can be seen through each others eyes.
Twitter arrived on the scene in 2006. I have come to think of Twitter as Facebook’s ADHD little brother. Hash tags (I’m smart enough to google what I want information on – I don’t want to be limited to other people’s tweets on the subject), trending topics (isn’t that what the news is all about? And they actually tell me from a journalistic perspective?), follow the leader (it’s like mini version of a child’s game where everyone wants to be the most important leader), retweeting (’nuff said, if you can’t think of something intelligent to say you just repeat what someone else already thought of), celebrities desperate for people to hang on their every tweet. Twits that tweet. Seems that the majority of tweets on Twitter are pointless drivel.
“While people can actually get into some relatively substantive discussions on Facebook or on blogs or message boards, Twitter is designed only to accommodate off-the-cuff comments, which usually are either poorly considered or so heavily abbreviated that they’re impossible to comprehend (or both). We’ve already lost thoughtful debate in the Western world to the insidious and intentionally controversial sound bite; we don’t need a popular Web site that not only encourages sound-bite “discussions” but actually excludes all other form of communication.”
I joined Twitter, then I almost immediately deleted my account. It just seemed like such a stupid media. I did join again, but only because a photo project website I was part of aggregated using Twitter. When the project ended, I deleted my Twitter account again. I do still have another Twitter account, but I don’t actually use it. It’s attached to a Facebook Page for a volunteer group I manage a website for. All three connect up together to try and ensure I reach those people who do use Twitter, although after a couple of years I still don’t see a point for it as in all the people who have gone through our courses, none have hooked up to Twitter, and those who have become involved in us via social media, have done so through Facebook. That’s enough for me to feel comfortable in my dismissal of Twitter as a media for our promotion.
Twitter and texting are killing language. The quick-hit communication culture is turning English into a bunch of random symbols. When there’s more value in knowing how to shorten words to the greatest extent possible than in knowing how to skillfully string them together, that’s a bad sign for a language. B4 vs before? L8r vs later? U vs you? It’s not cute, it’s mindless.
I think another of the issues with new social medias popping up is that most people don’t want to have to get messages from a dozen different places. “Seeing someone’s Tweet” sounds like something that would have been really exciting in junior high, but it’s not such a thrill now. And it’s just another source of communication to have to worry about. Once upon a time there was this fabulous thing called email where people could communicate in writing, and it was possible to receive and send messages in one place and through one interface. People used to gripe about people who only used e-mail and wouldn’t pick up the phone. If only we could limit ourselves to email and the phone now. Not that email is always that great either, people seem to have forgotten the simple niceties of a real letter format.
This says it better than I can…
“…it[Twitter] plays perfectly into our collective fantasy that we are All Somehow Special And Different and Celebrities In Our Own Ways. You don’t need to be somebody to be somebody. You can have followers from around the world. Followers! Pre-Twitter (a scarce five years ago) followers were a concept associated only with cult leaders and mother ducks. Losing one was once the exclusive concern of, say, Jesus or Moses, and it was a big deal that involved pieces of silver and at least one Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Even Buddha didn’t have any followers before he was 30, and to acquire them he had to occasionally leave the house and experience a major spiritual awakening. Sure, Twitter could be useful, for those times when you sit down for an entire day with a book and a flagon of coffee and manage to generate about a tablespoon of actual thought. “Get over here!”you tweet frantically. “Listen to this! Eureka!” But for the most part, it’s devoid of revelations.
In an increasingly technically complex and populated planet we are limiting ourselves to less space for expression? We are breaking thoughts into 140 character snippets and making ourselves more difficult to understand? Where is the logic in that?
You can probably tell by now that I loathe Twitter.
LinkedIn came along recently and I was “invited” to join several colleagues networks. I did. Then I realized I should probably set up a profile. It seemed different. professional. Then it made some unwelcome changes. It added groups, much like Facebook groups, that you subscribed to. That was annoying since now there were news feeds coming in from another source, irritating. Then they made it exclusive and added a premium scale. Done. I added a “find me on Facebook if you know me” note and was done with that one.
Google+ is the new kid on the block and it seems like a Facebook wannabe. Lots of people jumped onto it when it started, but it seems to have lost its steam. I don’t see it as anything much different than Facebook. it tried to capitalize on the success of Facebook, but I wonder if people have reached a saturation point.
Once you are set up on a network and have made your connections, what drive is there to try and switch everything over to a different platform? Nah. Not interested. And it seems that the vast majority of businesses are leaning the same way. More and more companies are setting up a presence on Facebook because it is so easy to subscribe to their news feeds. If you are on Facebook and you are a company I am interested, I’ll “like” you so I can hear what’s going on.
Facebook may have been initiated for a younger generation, but it has matured and become a valuable business tool as well as a fabulous mechanism for keeping in touch with friends. Twitter just seems too juvenile and unprofessional to me. And with the volume of people I know who are on Facebook, and the less-than-a-handful that are on Twitter, I don’t think I’ll undelete my Twitter account again. That source of fishy-related information on Twitter that I mentioned at the outset won’t be reaching me because it limited its audience to a format I find irritating. So I suppose I’ll find another source, there are always lots of alternatives to just about everything these days. That’s the beauty of the internet. So much information, why limit yourself and lose your potential clients/readers/audience?
In the end I did rejoin Twitter, but Facebook wins. For now. You can find me there if you care to. But I won’t be on Twitter in any active manner, just as an automatic cross posting, I try really hard not to be a twit, so I can’t ever see myself being an active “Tweeter” on purpose.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]