Microblogging 101

Charlotte Yun
Charlotte Yun

A recent web toy has arrived to suit our 30-second attention spans. To my delight, it comes dressed in glossy colours reminiscent of the slickest digital art.

It’s also aptly named after our aural apprehension of birds.

The product is called Twitter. Twitter is a web application that allows its users to blog in quick, sporadic entries over any given moment. It’s part-Facebook, part-blog and part-text messaging neatly compressed into a light-weight, visualrific web tool designed for the “blog-and-go” demographic. The application records your thoughts and doings as you blog along your day—kind of like a running diary of your every move and activity.

Twitter isn’t the only popular microblog tool, of course. There’s Soup.io, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and others that cater similarly to your exhibitionist needs. Web giants Facebook and Myspace, with their cluttered profile pages, are yesteryear; the latest evolution of our user-generated content comes now in simple, quick and microsleek packages.

Microblogging allows your audience to follow you around your most tedious tasks. For example, your 9 a.m. snippet of consciousness about brushing your teeth is read and circulated online like an instant message sent to everyone on the internet. With microblogging, the user broadcasts his or her information to a world wide web audience. Fans of Twitter (‘Twitterholics’) will argue it’s a great application to expand your social network, although I assume it does little for your privacy and even less for your real-life social life.

Web communication products like Twitter have certainly taken a large portion over our social lives, and enabled us to keep in touch with others better than ever. Despite that, my concern lies in whether these tools have commodified our personal lives into disposable, superficial little media experiments. In other words, our social relationships seem to have become no better than digitalized mini-pieces of shallow information.

I’m sure Twitter has some important uses, such as allowing parents to keep up with the mundane activities of children attending school away or letting employers keep tabs on their employees. The hype of Twitter circles around its frequent-updating abilities, after all. But none of this is helped by the fact that the representation of the user is an artificial construction; the real personality simply can’t be compressed into 25-sentence-long self-descriptions, spat onto the screen in several bursts of instant entries. Instead of connecting, microblogs tend to do more of the opposite—they disconnect by branding the user in front of a computer screen, isolating him or her within one web page. Realistically, you build your relationships under many years of real contact and interaction.

I do think, however, in our fast-paced digital age, tools like Twitter can probably be more enabling and useful than not. But given the materialization by social media of what was once very immaterial about ourselves, I still think it’s weird that anyone with a Twitter or a Facebook account will unquestionably feed large chunks of his or her personal life into a network facilitated by a bunch of Silicon Valley supergeeks.

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