You Just Don’t Get Twitter!
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
At the South by Southwest Interactive conference this past weekend I attended a number of sessions that dealt with the sociological effects of our new suite of social networking tools including twitter, facebook, online dating sites, blogs, and news and tech forums. At each talk during the five-day conference, a twitter hash tag was used to coordinate a background discussion on the topic being presented. This twitter stream was often used to steer the direction of the presentation and was used for questions during the Q & A period.
In “Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen,” Kathy Sierra talked about how she had famously avoided using twitter for years. People would insist, however, that, “You just don’t get twitter!” and in this talk she finally conceded to the mysterious genius of twitter—something no one seems to be able to really explain except by presenting a series of anecdotes about how twitter has changed their life.
Right after her talk Bruce Sterling took the stage for his meandering poetic monologue on the state of cyberspace. About half-way through the talk he got to the topic of twitter and looked out upon a sea of twittering audience members, paused a moment to listen to the tap-tap-tap of keyboards, before saying something like, “you listen to what’s being said for 2 minutes and then have to let everyone know what you heard so you twitter about it and then miss the part where I talk about dogs fucking horses… Don’t fool yourself–you are losing out here!” (more…)