While Twitter has proven to be a powerful communications tool for celebrities, activists, marketers and journalists, it hasn't caught on with mainstream users. Facebook, meanwhile, has become a required place to share photos and life's daily happenings.I thought the young people were all leaving Facebook. Maybe people will just get sick of all the "required" sharing. What if a higher standard of what counts as interesting and worth saying were to catch on? Where would rich folk park their extra cash?
Given its fast-paced nature, Twitter's service can at times make users feel like they are alone in a crowded room. The company has tried to make users feel more connected by making it easier to find people they already know.Loneliness in a crowd... the worst kind of loneliness. Discover solitude — loneliness elevated and sublimated, but you have to get away from the crowd. The answer is not in the crowd, even if a company tries to make you feel you've got company. You're on your own.
ADDED: Here's an essay by Todd Gitlin from January 2000, "How Our Crowd Got Lonely":
Half a century ago, Yale University Press published the first edition of ''The Lonely Crowd,'' by David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. The book's subject was nothing less than a sea change in American character: as America was moving from a society governed by the imperative of production to a society governed by the imperative of consumption, the character of its upper middle classes was shifting from ''inner-directed'' people who as children formed goals that would guide them in later life to ''other-directed'' people, ''sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others.'' In Riesman's metaphor, the shift was from life guided by an internal gyroscope to life guided by radar. The new American no longer cared much about adult authority but rather was hyperalert to peer groups and gripped by mass media....
Though published when television was still a fledgling medium, it took seriously the fact that Americans had been plunged into a media bath....
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The problem with twitter feeds is that they become overwhelming. If you follow people who overshare, suddenly you have too many tweets from them. Twitter's great for finding information, but it's awfully hard to organize it.
Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon
I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused
With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
That wept and glitter'd in the paly ray
And I did pause me on my lonely way
And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
Breath'd in mine ear: "All this is very well,
But much of one thing, is for no thing good."
Oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell!
- Coleridge, as a parody of the poetry of the day. (Biographia Literaria)
Buying into a company with one product that never, ever in its history has made a profit?
What could possibly go wrong?
Loneliness in a crowd... the worst kind of loneliness.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Suicidal Tendencies songs:
I scream at the sky, it's easier than crying
I'm shyish when I'm shouting out loud
I feel so alone in a room full of people
I'm loudist when I'm in a crowd
I'm alone, and nobody hears me
Can't nobody heal me, won't somebody help me
I'm alone, I just need
I'll take Twitter over Facebook any day. Much more fun!
Yet I read a piece yesterday that said the exact opposite....that tweens and younger kids are flocking to Twitter, not Facebook, because of its immediacy and intimacy.
Loneliness, is a crowded room,
Full of open hearts, turned to stone.
All together, all alone.
All at once, my whole world had changed.
Now I'm in the dark, off the wall,
Lit the strobe light up the wall.
I close my eyes, and dance til dawn.
Dance away the heartache,
Dance away, tears.
Dance away the heartache,
Dance away, fears.
Dance away...
------------------
Worked the bars and sideshows along the twilight zone
Only a crowd can make you feel so alone
And it really hit home
Booze and pills and powders, you can choose your medicine
Well here's another goodbye to another good friend
After all is said and done
Gotta move while it's still fun
Let me walk before they make me run
After all is said and done
I gotta move, it's still fun
I'm gonna walk before they make me run
In Twitter, you feel like you need to tweet a lot to exist at all, to be visible, since whatever you write is instantly swept off by everything everyone else is writing in their equally desperate striving to be seen.
It's a fast-paced analogy to life itself. You arrive on the scene (the screen) and you sweep into the space of those who were there before, crowding them, ousting them, until they and then soon enough you, are swept over the edge.
The anxiety!
The scuttlebutt in the self-publishing circles is that the change in Facebook algorithms has greatly diminished the reach an author's page once had. You can now pay a premium for a "boost" to get it back.
Snapchat, Google+, and Pintrest seem to be the direction the younger online users seem to be moving, according to the same circles. I don't know about Snapchat and Pintrest, but Google+ still seems to be a desert.
I think that Facebook will not have its current position forever. In another decade I question whether any single network will have Facebook's huge user base.
Twitter will likely never explode to that Facebook size but in a decade it might be a valuable amount of property in a more fragmented market, but that assumes long term perspective and investment plan.
I've never used Twitter to tweet, although I do follow a few key individuals (Iowahawk, mainly). Facebook really serves as an online biography if you will. I upload pictures to share with family. I share links with friends. It's there for someone to check out whenever they have the time or see something of interest. Twitter, on the other hand, is just noise. I do get the importance it has for celebs/sports figures/politicians as it's a way to bypass the media and talk straight to people, but what mid-level manager in Des Moines needs to "bypass the mainstream media"?
How could you post this without a reference to the eminal 1950 work , "The Lonely Crowd" by Riesman, et al.?
I bet not many mathematicians or physicists tweet.
They're never lonely.
I have the Twitter app on my phone and I look at it occasionally, thinking I'll see something interesting tweeted by the people I follow... but all I see are tweets from people I don't know. The people I follow "retweet" or "favorite" tweets from other people and these all show up in my feed and it's actually a little difficult to figure out where the stuff is coming from. I just look at it less and less.
Personally, I use Twitter as a newsfeed (fits well with my ADHD tendencies). The younger set of my circle has moved away from FB to Instagram and Vine.
140 is the loneliest number, apparently
Twitter is one if the dumbest services ever. It limits your conversation deliberately to a set number of characters. If you've ever tried constructing a twitter about a topic ends up being a puzzle where you have
To abbreviate everything to save characters or come up with synonyms to all words.
It's only good for announcing things like a new product line or a link to a web page that has an authors actual content. But as a means of communication it's just stupid.
Same thing with the service where you make quick 5 second videos. Why not 7 second videos?
Or the service where you host a picture which only stays online for a short period of time. If you care enough to host a picture why would you want it to disappear?
All these services are actually anti services.
"In Twitter, you feel like you need to tweet a lot to exist at all, to be visible, since whatever you write is instantly swept off by everything everyone else is writing in their equally desperate striving to be seen."
I think that says more about you than Twitter! I've never felt that way...TwitterLurking is an art form...
Twitter is good as news feed. But terrible for individuals to relay information.
If you want to let people know about your great article on the web it's good for that. But its not a good way to carry on conversations.
What's with all these services that limit your communication so drastically?
Vine allows you to make 6 second videos. How is that a benefit?
as far as companies go, how is Twitter even attempting to earn a profit. If they feel like hosting this magical texting service for free for millions of people, more power to them. But where's the profit? And why would someone invest in Twitter as a company.
The way to stand out is to be great. Steve Jobs never needed to twitter himself.
Because white privilege. Or something.
Twitter's a boring cocktail party featuring people wearing funny hats.
I have a twitter, but I just don't get it. My 16 year old seldom uses twitter. She's on tumbler, snap chat, Instagram and uses Facebook only to keep up with us oldsters. I enjoy Facebook because I have family and friends all over the country. I like the pictures of the pets and the kids. I wish that had been around when we were stationed overseas, would have saved a bucket-load of money on phone calls.
The 140 limit was originally a technical one having to do with typical SMS text-based message lengths on phones.
Twitter is useless for normal people, which is why they don't use it (except to, you know, maybe see content from A Few People).
Facebook - and any notional competitors in the same space - is useful for normal people, to socialize and share information with friends and family.
Thinking Twitter would replace that was daft. They're not even in the same industry, so to speak.
The 140 limit was originally a technical one having to do with typical SMS text-based message lengths on phones.
I believe that's the exact same reason Haiku's were originally restricted to 5-7-5.
Most samurai lived in areas with poor network coverage.
Twitter is for twits.
I was an early adopter and an earlier leaver of Twitter. I consider it a waste of time, faddish and made for people who think they have to share their every move.
I hate Twitter for aesthetic reasons. It's very repetitious too, the way it's showing you what somebody said before and what you replied too bugs. I have never had an account and don't plan to.
I do see some organizations dumping facebook or lamenting the limited reach but mostly that just seems like griping. They will go where the people are.
My kids use snapchat, instagram, and other services I have never heard of. I have never heard them mention twitter.
I do operate two twitter feeds that are followed for very specific reasons, and it's a good method to spread specific information.
The best definition of Twitter I have ever heard is this: "Twitter was invented so ordinary people can follow celebrities."
To counteract all the Twitter-hate I just want to say this: its a great tool if you like comedy and desire to follow comedians (possibly other word-smiths). Some comedians have state the character limitation is an enjoyable challenge to one striving to create funny and memorable one-liners.
Yes, Twitter is for twits, but there will always be a market for that.
It's real competition is probably not Facebook per se, but Instagram, which I have never used but understand to be a way of tweeting with pictures.
I knew Riesman's work should be noted here.
I quit facebook because they made some snide and sneaky alterations of my posts in the Fall of 2012. Then when I quit, they sent unlike messages to all my friends. My opinion is, as my father would say, the people who run that company are the shits.
I only know Twittier through Twitchy. Since I don't own a "smartphone," and I lead a laid back social life, I couldn't be bothered with it. Also, for politics, I live on the West Coast and by the time I get around to the news, it's well into the afternoon on the East Coast (where the action is..)
After I quit facebook, I put more effort into my own blog and did a variation on what I did when I taught in the community colleges. I've gradually gathered subscribers from all over the world. So, the blogging world is far from dead.
Facebook is a great way for families to stay together in a time when most have members overseas for one reason or another.
Twitchy, a twitter aggregator, is very amusing - just a sort of comedy club with the audience hurling 140 character insults at each other. You get to the heart of issues in no time.
Everything that ever was is being put on computers - village gossip (twitter), family Sunday dinners (Facebook). So I expect some genius will find a way to put tradition on social media, different traditions in their living form. And then we'll all be back where we were when it, namely IT, all began. Still trying to figure out the world beyond the digital flicker.
I use Althouse as my means of Internet Communication.
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