Offstumped – Commentary on Indian Politics

So why exactly do we twitter ?

Come to think of it until the 26th November 2008 Mumbai Attacks I had not even heard of twitter. Had vaguely heard of something called microblogging but didn’t quite understand why some one would microblog when you could blog.

My own run-ins with social networking have been less than social with infrequent updates to Facebook and a LinkedIn network that has become a chore to keep up with.

When I first got introduced to twitter thanks to Nitin over at the Acorn, it was to fill an important gap. The blog had its overheads when it came to quick reactions to real time events. The Twitter plug in for WordPress offered a convenient mechanism to post a short reaction. Perhaps that was the beginning of the end in a sense. With the Breaking News mindset setting in, increasingly commentary was getting more and more real time. Less and less deliberative. Much of the discussion on the blog moved to Twitter as well, as comments dried up.

And then there was a defining moment when Twitter took over subordinating Google News and email as the primary avenue for digital news sourcing and enrichment. To me the 2009 general election was that defining moment when Twitter usage peaked.

Soon the monologues became dialogues and a network around personalities, idiosyncrasies, grievances and agendas.

Someone recently commented that Twitter and Facebook are a kind of modern day madness. That observation is not too widely off the charts. When anonymous personalities who you have never met in real life, find space in your subconscious and make it to your dreams, it is a warning sign. The blackberry, the iPhone, iPod Touch and now the iPAD are all accessories to this mental crime.

It now no longer is enough to know a revolution is on Egypt. It also is no longer enough to see the revolution breaking on TV. It is far from enough until the live hash tag stream on Egypt is refreshed in quick succession multiple times over till the same tweets are and re-read to be reassured that nothing new has broken that you were the last to spot.

I count myself as the generation that made the cut over to the digital age. When I started work as a Trainee you went to a cube with a bare table staring at an empty wall. You shared one desktop PC with no network access. You shared one email account with the entire office. Microsoft Outlook did not set the agenda for the day and the social network was real people getting together over lunch and chai.

There was no Dead Time for you were not aware of the tedium that made up most of the day.

In our attempt to fill up dead time we have ended up becoming more and more aware of dead time. Now every dead minute is a minute not spent checking Twitter for any new updates, checking google for any new stories and checking the blog for any new comments.

But something else is happening in the background. The real world is shrinking to make space for the digital world. There are now digital expectations to be managed and digital sentiments to be respected towards individuals you have never met, will probably never meet, most of who are anonymous anyway.

All this makes one think the the anarchy on Twitter and the recent negativity on Twitter as a fallout of multiple unrelated digital controversies may not be such a bad thing after all. A Twitter backlash and some measured digital disengagement may actually be healthy. It might just bring a much needed reality check to our virtual emotions – both at the individual and collective level.

This is not to say the current trend towards crowd sourced real time media needs to be reversed or will get reversed. That trend is irreversible. What is perhaps needed is an adjustment on our part.

What that adjustment might be will hopefully become apparent once we figure out why exactly it is we Twitter ?

Filed under: Digital Citizen, Offstumped, Social Media Reflections