Since my last post about the virtues of Twitter, the email correspondence and blog posts have been pouring in fast and furiously. "What the hell are you doing on Twitter?" one of the more printable emails asked. "You of all people, the antichrist of Silicon Valley!"
Such a simple question deserved a simple answer: "How many Big Macs do you think Eric Schlosser consumed in order to write Fast Food Nation?" I emailed back: "I'm on Twitter because I am writing a book, a non-fictional narrative about social media."
The reason why I'm on Twitter can be expressed in significantly fewer than 140 characters: To understand social media, it is necessary to participate in social media.
Just as I published a blog in order to understand the blogosphere for my anti-Web 2.0 polemic Cult of the Amateur, so I'm now on Twitter to investigate the cultural, economic, and, above all, "social" ramifications of the social media revolution. Not being on Twitter while writing my narrative about the social media revolution would be akin to writing about the social and cultural consequences of the 19th century industrial revolution from a candlelit cave.
Thus, to borrow Twitter's ornithological theme, the micro-blog has become my perch from which to observe our new short-messaging nation. I'm like an ugly, unwashed version of Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in Hitchcock's ultimate voyeur movie, Rear Window. Only I don't need to look out of my living room to spy on the nasty, sad habits of my sad and nasty neighbors. Now, on Twitter, I can read the narcissistic, lonely, and anxious remarks not only of my immediate neighbors, but also of narcissistic, lonely, and anxious people around the world. What's not to love about existential grief in 140 characters?
"But you are not just on Twitter watching people," my email correspondent accused me. "You are a Tweet machine with over 1,500 followers."
So let me explain my supposed "enthusiasm" for writing tweets. I'm a book writer, a word peddler who makes a living selling words in 250,000-character chunks. And Twitter, an electronic network for messages of under 140 characters, is an ideal venue for writers to distribute their clever, superior words to the Twitmasses. It is a shop-window for talent, a dream platform to build an army of "followers" -- readers who literally follow and sometimes even redistribute my words. Twitter is dramatically more efficacious than any blurb on any book jacket. It's a beautifully speedy way for writers to market themselves in real time to actual or potential consumers of their books.
As I tweeted Beatrice.com's Ron Hogan, one of my book industry buddies: "Any published writer not on Twitter should have both their hands chopped off."
Note that I wrote "published writer" and not just "writer" (a supposed ideal to which more and more people seem to aspire). What I like about Twitter is that it's neither trying to blow up nor replace traditional media. Nobody is under any illusion about Twitter's business model for writers. There's no money -- not a single cent -- to be made for aspiring writers on Twitter. Real writers still, thank the lord, sell their words (in 250,000-character chunks) to publishing houses, which then distribute those words in book form. Twitter is purely a viral marketing platform, a 140-character short messaging network to unashamedly show off one's stuff to the world.
I've been using and abusing Twitter seriously now for a little over a month. The big question, the money question, is whether the latest social media sensation has made me more narcissistic, lonely, and anxious. That question can be quantified in dollars and cents. It has a value of around $24.99 (cheaper on Amazon.com, especially via the Kindle).
That question will, of course, be answered in my 250,000-character, non-fictional narrative about social media, which will be published next year.
No freebies on this one, I'm afraid, not even to my Twitter followers. You'll have to cough up the cash to get the real scoop on my Twittexistential crisis. Only the lonely give away their best stuff for free.
— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, can be reached on Twitter at @ajkeen.
I'm on Twitter because I'm tracking my time. I'm also using it to take note of the revisions I'm making on a hefty database. I know that sounds a bit lame, but I'd tend to think that these are valid uses of "Web logging". I wouldn't be surprised if there were a handful of other people doing similar stuff.
I think exploration is absolutely necessary when it comes to social media. So many people I’ve met (communication scholars, predominantly) being in complete denial of Facebook or Twitter. I really think different perspectives are needed through this time, when we appear to be learning again to move, talk and walk as new social media individuals. Studies must be made about the effect of social media in future social interaction, or in the relationship with authority. I am concerned if we, as microblogging species, will be able in the near future to actually speak our minds out, without the need of an interface…. But as your Twitting behavior, I think you’re more into it that you admit ;=)
But you're not on Twitter, Andrew. You're in a kind of Tupperware Party where your content is only visible to your "friends".
If you block someone on a whim, they can't see your tweets now with the new Twitter nerfing and that means no one can see the content of a so-called public intellectual on the Internet if they "talk back".
This is something apparently thin-skinned A-listers and masses of paranoid mediocrities lobbied the devs about. Now, when you block someone it's not just that you don't see them -- they can't see you, as if you were locked, even if you are not, and the system generates a fake comment "I'm only giving updates to friends".
What kind of public discourse is that? Talk to people, drive them to buy your book, then block them when you don't like something they say, and surround yourself only with sycophants?
And please don't invoke silly things about trolls and flamers, ideas that are old Well or MMORPG hangovers for infantile gamerz anyway.
You blocked me because I...called you a geek. Laugh Out Loud. In the course of mainly agreeing with you.
You who are concerned about anonymity and accountability merely drive people to alts when you pull stunts like blocking your content from view on the *INTERNET* for Christ's sake. Shame on you.
True the lines CAN get blurry... but it depends largely on the type of enterprise you work in =)
The lines here are rather crystal clear... we are no longer able to access web based e-mail, no social networking sites of any kind (all blocked by extreme filters), and IM is not allowed for business use under any circumstances.
Web2.0 is a kind of funny thing, there are those who buy into it wholly, and others that throw up a silver cross any time it's mentioned... same is true about the ubiquitous Cloud Computing. For some it's a case of "don't rain on my parade"
Many organizations employ pseudo W2.0 and cloud services within their own confines and behind the fence, but these are in closed environments, not accessible to others. They are controlled and have the same look and feel, but they can't be set free and others cannot access them, so they are limited in their scope and functionality to those with a "Members Only" card.
Yep, we have a reminder that pops up on our system every day that tells us who the system (hardware and software) belongs to, what it is and isn't to be used for, and that there is a limited inciendtal use policy, but no expectations of privacy.
My world and welcome to it =) Can you say iPhone... I KNOW I can!
in re "The office water cooler was replaced by the phone, which was replaced by e-mail, which was (socially) replaced by text/SMS, which was fortified by the blog and wiki, which is augmented by Twitter..." I have to laugh because barely an hour ago, our company's HR department distributed guideleines for using the company wiki and other social media, with this final reminder:
Don't forget to do your day job and be sure that your social media activity does not interfere with your work.
...you're "on Twitter" because you're writing a book about social media and you need to learn about it, what can you learn in 140 character blasts except who you need to talk to to find out more?
I find those that use Tweets to communicate are typically either being social in a mundane manner or soliciting information from others rathetr than being social.
And unfortunately, while there are those professionals that use it for business purposes, it is quickly becoming the "Ubertextsphere" of teens. It allows them to tell everyone that's following them what they did or are doing without having to text a bunch of people individually or manage group lists. Gak!
Yes, I have a Twitter account, and I have a dozen or so people that I follow or that follow me, but it's one of the least important social networks I have.
The office water cooler was replaced by the phone, which was replaced by e-mail, which was (socially) replaced by text/SMS, which was fortified by the blog and wiki, which is augmented by Twitter. It's another tool that some use, but it's not to my personal liking.
I agree that the 140 character limit does make it intellectually limiting. The tool is for a quick hit, not for a dialogue.
I am learning more about how to use it during some hobby time in the evenings. I haven't begun to figure out yet how it will work for me, but it is interesting nonetheless.
Pretty sure this post is already past the 140 mark!
Wishing you every success in your use and research of twitter.
Hi Cave Painter -- I always do feel I need to justify everything I do. You see, I was brought up in a very religious household. God hovered everywhere. So I'm always having to make sense of my actions. You?
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
Dead since 1832, Jeremy Bentham is a cadaver that has been living in public ever since, on display beside "Dapple," his favorite walking stick, in a glass-fronted wooden coffin at London’s University College. His coffin was coined as an “Auto-Icon” by Bentham, which is a neologism meaning "a man who is his own image." Below is an excerpt from Andrew Keen’s new book, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, in which he describes recognizing the Auto-Icon as a symbol for the digital age.
The following is excerpted from Andrew Keen's latest book, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (New York: St. Martin's Press: 2012), which will be released this week.
I had come to London that morning from Oxford, where I’d spent the previous few days at a conference entitled “Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford.” This was an event organized by the university’s Said Business School in which Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs had come to the closed, haunted city of Oxford to celebrate the openness and transparency of social life in the twenty-first century.
My old sparring partner Jimmy Wales has been busy predicting the future again. This time, in a speech last month at the Global INET conference in Geneva, Switzerland, he said that Hollywood is doomed. But rather than skewered on the sword of piracy, Wales forecasts, it will be killed by its own irrelevance.
“The future is already here -- it’s just not very evenly distributed,” William Gibson so presciently said in 1993. And late last week, that future, our open 21st-century future, was on show in a windowless late 20th-century building in downtown New York City, at an event hosted by AT&T.
Welcome to the zettabyte era, an age of increasingly wireless connectivity in which the gigabyte equivalent of every motion picture ever produced will travel across the Internet every five minutes. According to a Cisco white paper, global IP traffic, having increased eightfold over the last five years, will ascend to this zettabyte (one billion terabytes) peak by 2015. And by then, there will be more than 8 million households in the terabyte club and, even more astonishingly, another 20 million households producing half a terabyte (one thousand gigabytes) each month.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
Based on reactions in Nicole's Newsfeed, everyone hates this version of Facebook. This should matter to Facebook now that there's a real competitor on the scene named Google+.
Allowing users to share music and video on Facebook might sound like good news, but is this part of a coherent strategy, or is Facebook just stumbling from idea to idea?
While the publishing industry reels from the pressure of digital books and freely available content on the Web, one branch of the industry, the publishers of academic books and journals, remains above the fray. How is this possible and how long will it last?
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
