Twitter: Does it have to change the world?

Janet Street-Porter has used her role as Editor-at-Large for The Independent newspaper to express her disdain for Twitter. She claims that, “tweeting has replaced sex as this summer’s hot activity,” so the genesis for the vitriol may have been a particularly ungracious brush-off. Whatever the genesis of the rant the article does highlight some interesting perspectives on Twitter from those who don’t seem to understand the potential of the service.

Her objections seem to boil down to the perception that Twitter is,

• Shallow
• Narcissistic
• Illiterate
• Middle-class/middle-aged

Some of this is true but Twitter is a large community with many different types of people involved. The main area where I feel she misses the point though is that Twitter is about communities not individuals. Yes, the individual we love the NHS tweets don’t present a comprehensive argument for the benefits of the NHS. The aggregate of the tweets is interesting though.

I also find it heartening that people care enough about the NHS to defend it on such a forum. There is a great deal of information being shared in the form of links too, and this contextualisation of internet pages is useful for creating better search results. The power of Twitter is in the broad view, unless you know the individuals sending the messages.

There are lots of different types of people using Twitter for lots of different reasons. There are narcissists, brute-force marketers and spammers out there, but there are also some interesting, intelligent and generous people. It is important to recognise that you are in charge of whom you listen to. You build your network and this experience of constructing your own community is fascinating.

Most communities we are part of give us little power over their construction. They are built up by dint of where we live, work or recreate. Online communities are different in that we choose who to follow with no compulsion by accident of geography to put up with boors and fools.

I also feel it is important to point out that Twitter is as much about who you choose to listen to as what you choose to say. I have been able to find a network of intelligent, generous and often humorous web designers, developers, educators and musicians. Through listening to them I learn a great deal and have fun. I hope that I am able to help, support and occasionally raise a smile for them too. It would seem only fair.

Twitter is a young medium. It has a bias towards technology friendly 30 to 40-year-olds at the moment, but it could become many things in time. There is a pressing issue of how the blunt-force marketers will integrate into or be jettisoned from the service and more issues like this will come up in the years to come. It is shallow and foolish to judge the entire medium based on the behaviour of attention-whores like Jonathan Ross or Ashton Kutcher just as it would be ill-advised to base an opinion of op-ed writing on the work of JanetStreet-Porter or Kelvin McKenzie.