Craft Beer Radio

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Well, let me see if I can't clarify my position somewhat.

On the idea that the last 30 years have been a step backwards in social interaction, I'd take something of an issue with that. It's true that interaction has changed, but in many ways it has brought social interaction between people who are NOT face-to-face with each other much closer than it used to be: either a letter or a telegraph. The phone gives us an immediate vocal connection with people, and email, faxing, text messaging, and internet chat give us an immediate text-based connection with people that mirrors letters and telegraph but is much more immediate and therefore connective.

What this DOES do is make the formulation of the written word of less importance than when one had to rely on letters to do all the communication for them. For example, the brilliant and illuminating letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are something of a lost form.

That said, there have been illuminating and intricate and fascinating emails or faxes or internet chats or message board conversations that I have seen and/or taken part in, and I do believe that social communication and real intellectual interaction exists in those forms. Sure, it can be abused, or used for other purposes, but the point is that the medium at least allows for the possibility of genuine interaction.

And then we have Twitter. One could, I suppose, make the case that the "I just pooped" tweets are abuse of Twitter just as much as such a message would be an abuse of IM. However, the rigidly enforced textual limitations on Twitter, as well the mass levels to which messages are sent out but not necessarily responded too, combined with the unfortunate but very real fact that not everyone who responds is seen by everyone who got the original message, makes conversation and real social communication impossible.

I think this is a point that bears repeating. On a message board or a chat room, people can have long, involved conversations, and anyone who is in the room or reading the message board can jump with their own points. In fact, the very purpose of the medium is to allow for that social interactivity.

On Twitter, however, a mass tweet is pointedly sent only to those who are following that particular user. Someone who responds to that tweet on their own massive scale may be alienating someone who did not see the first tweet because they do not get that person's twitter messages, or their response may be lost by others who received the first tweet but do not follow the tweets of the second person who responded. Tweets that lead to offline conversations between the Tweeter and the responder are something of a different story but ultimately turn a mass medium into a singular medium, which, while it is not in any sense a bad thing to limit interaction, it is not the overall purpose and purported use for which Twitter was designed.

In a sense, I'm perfectly fine with the system if it is used in a way that it was not designed for, but I have no use, and in fact, actively disdain, the concept by which it was originally designed. The mass distribution of enforced short blips of effectively meaningless information is by any reasonable standard an affront to social interaction. Should the information be short but nonetheless meaningful, the tool has purpose, but if the tool is flooded with meaningless information and only occasionally graced with meaningful information, then the overall time spent sifting through the haystack to find the proverbial needles simply isn't economical in any way.