Now, Google works better than anything out there if you know what it is you want to find, but Twitter, Broadstuff asserts, is where you go to understand what’s really going on…
Read Google, and you’d barely know anything about Summly because the first 7 pages comprise of press regurgitation and it has utterly failed at telling you anything useful about it….
…But search Twitter, and you get a totally different story. Twitter, despite a reputation for being celebrity and inanity obsessed, is in fact – on the basis of my search anyway, far less so than Google. What is certain is that Twitter gave me a far fuller picture, within the first page I got, and, in this case anyway was the better search engine by far.
The whole media world optimises for Google, it goes on to say, which is making it less useful.
Out of utter respect for Howard Rheingold (and a weariness of Twitter neologisms) I’m going to stick with calling it Twitter literacy. If you have been reading about Twitter for a while I bet you five quid a revolting part of your brain is doing back flips right now, trying to twist “Twitter” and either “literacy” or “neologism” together.
It’s OK – the noise does that to you. Drives you mad.
The noise may quieten down soon (maybe, possibly, please) as Twitter “down the backlash slope of the hype cycle”, as Howard puts it.
To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet.
He continues…
The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it.
There you go. A lot of very web literate souls took a year or more to learn to read Twitter, to speak Twitter, to become literate in it and weave it into their lives. Granted, there are more people who have the knack now, who can pass the skills along. But still the sign up – try it – becomes part of your media life process is seen by analysts and commentators as the only path that will lead to success.
I’m sure there is a data viz tool out there somewhere that if applied to my Twitter stream from three years ago would show a sputtering start, some pauses, a falter and then a stream of use. I’m sure I never even started doing really literate things like “re-tweeting” until about two years after I began.
Anyway, read Howard’s post, not least because he has compiled an elegant and compelling list of reasons that
Bring on the backlash, and an end to the hub-bub that distracts from people learning to read Twitter.
: : Bonus video. You could do a lot worse than watching this video of Laura Fitton talking to Google about Twitter. Smart stuff…
