Are We Overcommunicating?
If you haven’t heard about the newest twist in the personal communications front, it’s called Twitter, an instant messaging system that lets subscribers sent short text messages on their cellphones without first entering a recipient phone number.
At first the service was intended for cellphone users to send a single text message to a group of friends, but now it seems that the service has caught fire as a way to blast out updates to even larger audiences. For example at a recent media conference, a large plasma screen was set up along with a connection to Twitter so that participants could read scrolling messages from conference attendee cellphones such as someone looking for a lost partner, where hot parties where planned, or suggestions for great local restaurants. Think of it as the 21st century version of the Post-it note bulletin board.
The problem is that Twitter has become the modern version of “mouth-to-mouth” networks taken to the next level. Twitter is helping to create a world where the noise of the social crowd is being amplified exponentially, forcing into the open a basic pemise: Those who want to know what everyone is doing all the time and those who are revolted at the idea of giving up that information or caring about anyone else’s.
One marketing consultant, Dave Cote, summed the problem up in a recent blog post entitled “Twitter is for Twits”:
“Do people really care what/when you’re eating? When you wake up, commute to work/school, etc… Not only is it disturbing for the people posting on Twitter, but there’s also something creepy about obsessively following someone’s posts. In essence, you are stalking them and tracking their every waking thought.”
“I see Twitter as a useless indulgence in our online world. Here’s an idea: instead of obsessing about what your friends are doing every second of the day and making sure that they know what you are up to – go out and actually do something!“
Already Twitter tools are popping up such as maps that show where people are “twittering” and a Twitter search engine. But whether Twitter survives to become a mainstream communications vehicle or it dies like many passing fads is yet to be seen.
Hopefully if it does live on, it might result in the kind of messages that we would truly want to hear….but I’m not holding my breath.
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