Bricks and Boxes

My sister and I have been trying to fashion a useful explanation of Twitter. Some very busy but sensible professionals are suddenly hearing that they must get hip to online social networking. They come to us for the what and how, but the most difficult is sometimes “why?”

Part of the difficulty is not all inquisitors have the same references upon which to build. What is Twitter? It’s like a blog, only 140 characters. It’s a chat room. It receives text from your phone. It’s an RSS feed. A party line. Citizens band radio. Email. These labels mean different things to everyone, if they even know them all.

The other part of this difficulty is my refusal to define any tool by only one of its uses. If someone asked me what the automobile was for, I wouldn’t say it was for racing. It gets you to work or the store. It gets the goods to the store. On the way to the store you hear news on the radio, or the kids sing songs in the backseat. And other things happen in back seats when the car is parked!

Likewise, I find it hard to define a tool without including the uglier uses. You can’t fully appreciate the history of the car, and it’s importance to some people, without recognizing that some live in a car. So part of my definition of Twitter recognizes that some use it to spam.

Certain people have trouble with any tool described to do anything for which they already have tools to do. If I told them the automobile was to get them from here to there, they’d tell me, “Well, I can walk or bike. Why should I worry about parking?” (Personally, I very much prefer to walk whenever I can. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Here’s my new pitch. People are all channels. Twitter, email, Facebook, and every new toy we’ll adopt henceforth are just part of a personal communication movement that started before any of us were born. This is at least the why.

To explain. They say that generations who’ve grown up entertained by a creative medium are naturally trained to create for that medium. If you’ve read books you know a bit about what makes good writing. If you’ve grown up with paintings and photography, you can frame the subject in a picture. The generations which have grown up with television and film can generally script a show or movie more naturally than the first generation of movie-makers. It’s not to say such a generation’s TV programming and movies would be better or at all original, but they know what makes a scene and have a warehouse of familiar parts they can piece together.

I can’t tell you which generation first decided each individual must be heard. I believe each generation craves this a little more than its predecessors, because it was tuning in to more and more people’s lives. Before Twitter there were websites, email forwarding, cable access, CB radio, party lines, pamphlets on billboards, one-man shows, and singing to passersby on the street. The tools are new, the signals travel farther, but the momentum has been gaining throughout our history.

This is Twitter, a million people singing their own song. A lot of it is tired and boring, and it just might always be mostly saturated with boring borrowed bits of our lives. Because it’s a system that forces us to broadcast just to listen, because to be heard and to get responses from people who may contribute useful answers, you must maintain your own live signal. It will never be easy to broadcast a life of popular interest.

Some share personal thoughts, but their thoughts are usually common and limited in depth. “I’m doing the dishes.” Heck, strangers are listening. And most people in the world would never share a personal thought of real interest, “My father taught me how to put these dishes away when Parkinsons robbed him of his own faculties. He was three years younger than I am now.”

So what is Twitter? Twitter is a channel through which to broadcast your life and listen to other peoples’ lives. Potentially, we will talk about the groundbreaking work we perform, describe the beautiful places we’ll go, and capture the fleeting moments of introspection we have along the way. Tune in to whomever you wish. Sing along.

Hear my song at http://twitter.com/anthonycloskey