Why Did They Have To Call It Twitter??

Here's a little story that happens to me twice a month.  You're out with friends, maybe friends you don't see that often, or you're with some coworkers, who are maybe older than you.  Someone says something like, "Yeah, well I don't spend my day Twitter Twatting!"  Everyone chuckles.  Now you're faced with a dilemma.  Do you open your big fat mouth and give a full throated defense of the concepts behind Twitter?  Do you point out to your friend that he DOES spend his whole day stalking his ex-girlfriends on Facebook?  Do you casually mention to your coworker that he DOES send out an average of 74 e-mails a day--10-12 actually cogent to your enterprise--and copies everyone and their mother to them? 

Probably not.  Who wants to be that guy?

  On the few occasions when I have had too much to drink to properly keep my mouth shut or when I've felt that the number of guilty twitter users in the group was higher than the jokester may have imagined (If we geeks rely on anything, it's safety in numbers) I have found it difficult to properly define just what it is about Twitter that makes it useful and compelling.  My standby argument has been that it is one of those things in life where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  That by careful filtering of the firehose of data that Twitter spews, one can find a rich vein of interesting information.  And that's all true.  But inevitably my sparring partner will say, "But why should I give a fuck about the fact that you're sitting in traffic and the guy next to you is picking his nose?"  This is why I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place.  What's the answer to that?  Why should he give a fuck?  I'd be forced to respond by saying, "Well, that's not the kind of thing I would broadcast!"  But let's be honest, if I'm sitting in traffic and the guy in the car next to me is oblivious to the fact that everyone around him is watching as he mines his nasal cavity, I can't say I wouldn't grab my phone and blast out: "Guy in the car next to me is digging for gold in his brain."  Sure, it's mostly for my own amusement while stuck in traffic, but I'd like to think some of my followers and friends would find it amusing as well.  Why on Earth would I think that?

Then last week while listening to Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do? I heard the answer.  While discussing social networking, Jarvis cites the work of Leisa Reichelt and a term she coined to describe the twitter/facebook social broadcasting phenomenon.  She called it ambient intimacy.  An oxymoronic phrase that perfectly describes the driving force behind our willingness to share and consume the little things that compose our day to day lives.  Reichelt's premise holds that the value of social media broadcasting technology like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace is that it lowers the barrier between individuals and increases the level of intimacy they feel with one another with a low cost of time and energy on any one individual.  Reichelt later coins the companion term, ambient exposure.  Ambient exposure describes how we potentially make ourselves more socially vulnerable as a result of social broadcasting.  

These two terms make a considerable amount of sense to me, and they help define the benefits and shortcomings of a self-as-content world.  When you bore through the traditional definitions, what is the difference between your best friend and your roommate from college?  You get along with both equally well and you have many things in common with both, yet they are not friends on equal footing.  The bulk of the disparity comes from small intimacies.  Your best friend knows what movies you've seen and where you were last weekend.  He/She was probably there.  Your best friend knows about the time with the girl at the place. He/She was there.  What separates out your college roommate and the hundreds of other friends and acquaintances and simultaneously isolates your best friend is the amount of information available to them about you.  Twitter and the other social broadcasting mediums can help to shrink that information gap, making it possible for us to maintain--even if it's a subconscious effort--more relationships at a greater rate of social return.  

The best thing about couching the technology in these terms is that it lends itself to a number of long accepted and understood corollaries in the business world.  If you're an investment analyst or a day trader, you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, you watch the ticker all day, and you hardwire yourself to any business news source you can find.  These constant streams of data help to make you money.  If you are in sales, you are continuously on the search for new products, competitors products, and new marketing strategies.  It behooves you to be aware of the entire industry around you as much as possible.  If you are in advertising you seek out the most detailed information about the largest chunks of each demographic, watching Nielson ratings and other media metrics like a hawk.  

Just as awareness of your industry and its machinations helps you to do your job and turn a greater profit, receiving the broadcasts of your social peers and broadcasting yourself helps you to have a better understanding of your social sphere and make "social transactions" more fulfilling.  Finally!   A defense of Twitter based in logic and at least some observational evidence, without once invoking the "It's a good place for breaking news!" argument.*  

Some will continue to argue that by creating an abundance of social transactions, removing the scarcity of knowledge of others, we will cheapen ourselves and our culture.  I think this argument misses the point entirely.  Our culture has its seedy side, and we place an inordinate amount of value in things that can largely be agreed to be worthless.  We are navel-gazers.  That is not a result of greater social networking, or anything new at all.  It is a question for the psychologists to answer, and one they've been working on since the inception of that field of study.  Social networking and broadcasting does not make this part of our humanity worse.  The power of the internet does make it easier to engage in mindless entertainment, just it makes it easier to learn, to research, and collaborate.  It is turning the volume up on our humanity; increasing the strength of that signal, not weakening it.  The Golden Rule of computing, "Garbage in, Garbage out" applies to the internet and the connections that it establishes.  The humanity we see on the internet is the humanity we see everywhere else, we've just made it easier to track, quantify, and retain.  

*It IS a good place for breaking news but that can't be the primary reason for Twitter's continued existence, or it would have fallen away into obscurity already.