Disparaging Twitter

It seems common to disparage twitter by saying that people are just sharing mindless minutiae that no one cares about.Maybe it is the case that twitter is, in fact, a time-wasting endeavor08072009-twitter-fail-whale filled with people just pumping out tons of information that no one cares about. I am much more inclined to believe, however, that something doesn’t get as popular as twitter without providing some benefit to its users. Whether or not I can provide an eloquent defense of the utility of twitter, I think that its ubiquity (and the ubiquity of social networks in general) provides fairly compelling that they do provide utility (and probably net utility).

And that is why I find it so grating to hear the standard poorly-articulated disparagements of Twitter (and before that Facebook and mySpace and LiveJournal, etc) - the question is not “why should I care what you are doing?” (or at least, that is not necessarily an interesting question). In fact, the more interesting question is, “What, if any benefit does Twitter provide to its users, and if it does not provide any benefit, why do they use it?” If you don’t think that there is any reason to want to know about the minutiae of other peoples’ lives, then you should be puzzled by Twitter and you should almost certainly not be dismissive. Think about it - if millions of people derive some benefit from using Twitter but you can’t even fathom why, by determining why they find it entertaining, you could be discovering a previously unknown form of pleasure. Or maybe you’ll have a better understanding of how the millions of people around you think and interact. That’s not to say that the search costs won’t be higher than the potential benefits (that’s up to you), but I do think that it’s worthwhile to recognize that these sorts of puzzle are more interesting than you might think a priori.

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