Are you twittering your blogging or blogging your twittering? All there is left to do is to take a cellphone video clip of yourself texting your blog about twittering and posting it to YouTube and we’re done. Does nobody remember Warhol’s 8 hour silent film of the Empire State Building? No, really, is there something actually comforting about knowing someone’s reading about the minutiae of your life? If so, it could be understand in two radically different dimensions: either we are so starved for real human contact that we’ll settle for any contact however contentless; or we are so completely fed up with real human contact that a little consensual twittering is about all we can stomach. Is the plea — “someone please care about my pointless life?” or “Here I am: now leave me alone?”
Nice point, Peter — even if I think that you & Leo are taking it a little far.
I suspect that it’s a little more of the latter. Increasingly, we are permanently and ubiquitously available on email and mobile. Our communications (and our etiquette) must evolve to address this.
There’s a welcome opportunity for phatic communication, little chirps and signals that require no acknowledgement (like Twitter’s “tweet”, Facebook’s “poke” and status updates.)
I think there’s some kind of spectrum or quadrant we could draw here:
I’ve been asking a few people what they are using Twitter for. Ben over at Redant (www.redant.com.au) says “the only actual use I’ve found for this infernal twitter is server monitoring: http://twitter.com/RedAntNotify this watches all of our servers and then pings if something goes down. I have no idea how Twitter can afford to send me 18 gazillion SMS messages for free, but I’m not complaining.”
1 Peter Hirsch // Jun 28, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Are you twittering your blogging or blogging your twittering? All there is left to do is to take a cellphone video clip of yourself texting your blog about twittering and posting it to YouTube and we’re done. Does nobody remember Warhol’s 8 hour silent film of the Empire State Building? No, really, is there something actually comforting about knowing someone’s reading about the minutiae of your life? If so, it could be understand in two radically different dimensions: either we are so starved for real human contact that we’ll settle for any contact however contentless; or we are so completely fed up with real human contact that a little consensual twittering is about all we can stomach. Is the plea — “someone please care about my pointless life?” or “Here I am: now leave me alone?”
2 Mat Morrison // Jul 3, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Nice point, Peter — even if I think that you & Leo are taking it a little far.
I suspect that it’s a little more of the latter. Increasingly, we are permanently and ubiquitously available on email and mobile. Our communications (and our etiquette) must evolve to address this.
There’s a welcome opportunity for phatic communication, little chirps and signals that require no acknowledgement (like Twitter’s “tweet”, Facebook’s “poke” and status updates.)
I think there’s some kind of spectrum or quadrant we could draw here:
{highly intrusive, pre-planned, time-sensitive, location-sensitive, rich}
Dinner date
{highly intrusive, time-sensitive, location-sensitive, rich}
Corridor meeting
{highly intrusive, time-sensitive, rich}
Telephone call
{mildly intrusive, rich, requires action or thought}
Voice mail
{non-intrusive, may require action or thought}
SMS
{non-intrusive, requires no action or thought}
Status update, tweet, poke
3 Peter // Jul 3, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I like the taxonomy, Matt. I’m somehow reminded of Stevie Smith’s Dead Man: “I’m out here too far, not waving but drowning.”
4 Leo Ryan // Jul 6, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I’ve been asking a few people what they are using Twitter for. Ben over at Redant (www.redant.com.au) says “the only actual use I’ve found for this infernal twitter is server monitoring: http://twitter.com/RedAntNotify this watches all of our servers and then pings if something goes down. I have no idea how Twitter can afford to send me 18 gazillion SMS messages for free, but I’m not complaining.”
5 Nigel Shardlow // Jul 11, 2007 at 11:09 am
A pedant writes:
“I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning”
6 Peter // Jul 11, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Lee Gomes in today’s Wall Street Journal re microblogging” “But a psychologist might say that the point isn’t the content, it’s the connection.”