Amid the inanity is a real revolution in communication
The Age
Monday August 17, 2009
AFTER following him for a couple of days, on Friday I received a request from the Dalai Lama to followme on Twitter.HisHoliness€™ most recent tweet was this Quote of the Day: €śThe best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.€ť Another was: €śRemember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.€ťYet another was the sobering €śNothing is permanent.€ťNothing I could tweet in return could add to this store of wisdom and, as karmic character-building as the quotes are-despite the Twitterer being a fraud, with 75, 843 followers, I might add-I don€™t think I could stomach a daily dose of such existential epiphanies. I politely declined the request and deleted the DL from my list.See what I did there? I made the decision to not followsomeone on Twitter. There should be more of that, especially from those in the media who have taken up bagging the microblogging service as a sport.As popular as Twitter is- 32 million users back inMay and growing fast, according to Time magazine-among the selfappointed maturity police it€™s more popular to whinge about it and the people who use it. Critics carp about the inanity of the messages sent, the uselessness of the conversations, the waste of precious time taken up by, as one writer recently put it, a bunch of dull, self-absorbed twits.First point: If you don€™t like the tweets you receive you have yourself to blame. You choose who to follow, you get what you ask for.Whingeing about Twitter tweets is like whingeing about the blather of school kids at a bus stop. You have the choice to walk away from the conversation and find one that matches your intellectual maturity.Second point: Twitter is fostering a social revolution most of its critics do not understand.Twitter has been put to uses not dreamt of by its creators.Originally designed as a vehicle for 140-character messages between friends, it is nowa communication tool that punches far above its weight. In addition to snippets of text, users can now send links to video clips, photos, blogs and discussions. They even break news-the plane crash in NewYork€™sHudson River in January was first reported via Twitter.Other uses are more creative.For a week inMay, commuters passing through London€™s Kings Cross and St Pancras stations used Twitter on their mobiles to submit haikus that within minutes were displayed on an electronic board for all to see.Twitterers are adding a line at a time to the libretto of an opera to be performed at London€™s Royal OperaHouse. For two days last week people watching the annual Perseid meteor shower tweeted about the spectacle as it rained thousands of space-borne embers across European and North American skies.Also last week, attendees at the 4th Annual SocialMedia Summit, held here inMelbourne, tweeted a stream of updates to those unable to attend-with questions from external Twitterers fed back to speakers during question times.Twitter is increasingly used for political activities. In 2007, Egyptian pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd El Fattah used it to report to supporters that he and his wife had been arrested by authorities in Cairo, following up with progress reports on their treatment.Fearing its ability to mobilise protesters, the Chinese Government closed down the service in China earlier this year in the leadup to the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.More recently it was used to monitor and report on the aftermath of elections in Iran and Afghanistan. And, in the past fortnight, the Kremlin was accused of cyber attacks that brought down the service to silence aGeorgian blogger on the first anniversary of Russia€™s occupation of South Ossetia.This is not the behaviour of someone trying to shut down conversations because they find them inane, immature or a product of the self-absorbed.Fun, news-sharing and political activity aside, the growing power of Twitter is its ability to enable real-time conversations about live events to create communal experiences.Imagine sharing the inauguration of a president with your fellowcitizens (as tens of thousands did during Obama€™s swearing in); the climax of an immensely popular TV show(as happened with the finale of Master Chef); or watching this year€™s grand final from your lounge room and being part of a Twitter conversation about the match with thousands of fellowfooty fans.It€™s the way of the future. Try it.Gordon Farrer is technology editor.
© 2009 The Age