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andrewduckerI've just finished reading Francesca Elston's New Year Ruminations on Twitter*. Which talks about how Twitter doesn't (for her) seem to be improving the quality of conversations, which is a primary good for her. And I thought I'd take my comment on it and reproduce it here (and edit it into something more cohesive and comprehensible):
I’ve said (probably enough times to bore people about it) that Twitter is Declarative, not Discursive. Even when people are sending messages back and forth to each other, they tend to be viewed as individual statements, not as actual conversations. People talk at each other, rather than to each other, and a lot of the time it feels like they're playing to the crowd - everyone standing on their pedestal, in front of a crowd of pedestals.
There’s darn little context with Twitter, and the interface doesn’t make it any easier to get some. This makes reading other people's conversations tricky, particularly if you're only following one of them.
I do like it for the links, and for seeing things I might otherwise not. And I like keeping up to date with little things people are saying, and are up to. It works better than Facebook for that, for some reason. (Although Facebook does conversations better than Twitter does, albeit not as well as Livejournal.)
But I recently made a pre-New-Year resolution to take those 140 characters, and use them as the first line of a Livejournal post instead. To see if they led me into more depth, and to see if they sparked discussions. I think this will add more value for me than Twitter does.
*The icon is entirely coincidental. I recently remembered to turn back on the icon randomizer on Semagic.
I’ve said (probably enough times to bore people about it) that Twitter is Declarative, not Discursive. Even when people are sending messages back and forth to each other, they tend to be viewed as individual statements, not as actual conversations. People talk at each other, rather than to each other, and a lot of the time it feels like they're playing to the crowd - everyone standing on their pedestal, in front of a crowd of pedestals.
There’s darn little context with Twitter, and the interface doesn’t make it any easier to get some. This makes reading other people's conversations tricky, particularly if you're only following one of them.
I do like it for the links, and for seeing things I might otherwise not. And I like keeping up to date with little things people are saying, and are up to. It works better than Facebook for that, for some reason. (Although Facebook does conversations better than Twitter does, albeit not as well as Livejournal.)
But I recently made a pre-New-Year resolution to take those 140 characters, and use them as the first line of a Livejournal post instead. To see if they led me into more depth, and to see if they sparked discussions. I think this will add more value for me than Twitter does.
*The icon is entirely coincidental. I recently remembered to turn back on the icon randomizer on Semagic.
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