On an unrelated note, this cat looks like Freddie Mercury

Why Twitter is Like Yelling Down a Dark Hallway

In about 2008, I noticed an increasing number of people talking about ‘twitter’.  Being late to Myspace, and Facebook I thought “hey, I’d better jump on this bandwagon early, so I can tell all my friends I had a twitter account before it was cool”.  After making an account, realising there was nothing to do and that nobody liked hipsters anymore, I walked away from the site without letting anybody ever know I’d signed up. 

Twitter did grow however, but not in the ways I thought it would. Instead of becoming a place for friends to connect, like a social network, it was more about what celebrities had to say, getting your ‘tweet’ on ‘Q and A’ and a way for news stations to gather statistics on how many people are talking about the latest natural disaster.  While these three are useful and somewhat interesting, what does this mean for the average Joe MicroBloggs?  What does a person like me contribute to the twittersphere?  

Let’s be blunt:

I like talking about myself, and why wouldn’t I, really I’m a fantastic example of a human being.  I bet you like talking about yourself too, am I right?  But let’s think about this for a second.   Not everyone’s a winner, and nobody really cares to know when self-indulged, delusional losers like you and I are “Enjoying a great cup of coffee” or are “Ready to watch the cats play”.  These are real tweets from people I’ve never heard of, seriously I looked them up.  Case and point right here.  

Bottom line, everyone’s talking, but nobody’s listening.

There are 200 million people on Twitter posting a collective 140 million tweets a day, or 97,000 tweets a second (Cross, 2011).  From this vast sea of people, someone’s bound to be listening right?   Right!? Well considering your tweet is competing for attention amongst 200 million others, including Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Ashton Kutcher, Kim Kardashian, and almost every famous or pseudo famous person you’ve ever heard of, it’s fairly unlikely.  You’d have more luck sticking your head out the window and yelling your views on abortion to the outside world, not to mention if you did so you wouldn’t be limited to 140 characters or less. 

I think this quote sums up how I feel a little better than I do.

                “You’re just yammering to yourself and everyone is so preoccupied with the sound of their own tweets that they don’t care what you have to say” – Randazza (2009, p.3)

BUT.  No, really there is a BUT!

I would like to point out twitters use as a means to deliver breaking news.  Twitter IS actually quite a useful tool as an alternate means of vital communication in times of crisis, such as natural disaster (Sinnappan, Farrell & Stewart, 2010).  Though there has been studies which found tweets in disasters to be nothing of any actual use or help, Sinnappan et al. (2010) found in their analysis of tweets during Australia’s black Saturday that of the tweets coming from Victorian residents, more were helpful rather than not helpful.  By helpful they mean “fires are heading east to ___town” or “Has anyone heard from John?” as opposed to general feelings or statements like “Gee, this is a real tragedy”.

So the take home messages are:

Use Twitter to listen to what famous people have to say, but don’t bother tweeting about your own life because it’s boring and nobody cares

And

Tweeting about natural disasters can be helpful, but only if you actually have important information, otherwise your tweets are just getting in the way, and are actually making it more difficult for people to find vital information.

Cross, M. 2011. ‘Twitter World’ in Bloggerati, Twitterati: how blogs and twitter are transforming popular culture, Praeger, EBL eBook Library pp 51-65.

Randazza, J.  2009.  Go tweet yourself: 356 reasons why Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites suck, Adams media, 57 Littlefield street, Avon, U.S.A

Sinnappan,S., Farrell, C. and Stewart, E. 2010 ‘ Priceless Tweets! A study on twitter messages posted during crisis: Black Saturday’, Paper presented at the 21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems (Brisbane)