How Twitter can bring us together

"Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment."

(via Mining The Thought Stream)

“Sentiment”. Yes, that’s a very important point. Because “tweets” are very short, immediate messages, they are very different in nature from blogs, discussion forums, or any other longer means of communication, which take longer to write and so are generally more thought out, less spontaneous. More mental, less from the gut.

Also from the article (emphasis added):

What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about.

Traditional search engines typically focus on more static content — the blogs, discussion forums, and so on — and so do a good job of serving up “ideas”, abstractions, but they don’t do so well in putting us in touch with the actual people behind those ideas. In other words, neither search engines nor the content they index do much for building a sense of community and for social interaction.

Sure, discussion forums and blogs (with their related comments) provide an opportunity for people to discuss specific topics together, but everyone involved usually has some sort of “agenda”, even if it’s simply to get their specific message heard by the others. I mean, you spend all that time writing up a message, so you want people to read and understand it, right? And many times, you may even be trying to persuade someone to actually do something or to agree with you on some point. So there tends to be a great deal of emphasis on our own views and on self-promotion, which isn’t particularly (directly) conducive to uniting a community.

Twitter, on the other hand and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, isn’t really all that much about self-promotion at all, but is much more about just making contact and connections with other people. There simply isn’t enough space in 140 characters to do any sort of persuading. And the fast, immediate nature of the medium makes the message all about what we happen to be doing or thinking in that moment. Kinda like bumping into a friend in the supermarket.

But then, how many of us actually bump into friends at the market anymore? In a way, Twitter is bringing that element of “social serendipity” back into today’s increasingly global community, both online and off. So while we may not physically bump into people in the market so much any more, we can certainly virtually “bump into” someone on Twitter doing something similar to us and strike up a brief conversation, and that could then lead to something more in-depth somewhere else, either online on some blog or wherever or face to face in the “real” world.

So yeah, tweets can be pretty inane, but then you wouldn’t exactly discuss the meaning of life in a supermarket aisle, would you? But that doesn’t make that chance encounter any less important to your relationship with that person.

People complain about Twitter’s lack of features, but in a way, that’s what makes Twitter so ingenious. By making it a bare-bones, lowest-common-denominator service, virtually anyone can perform its most essential function: answering the question “What are you doing?”

Anything beyond that is left entirely to individual preference and to serendipity.

~G

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!