NYT: Decrying banality of Twitter misses the point
Steve Safran April 22nd, 2007
It’s nice to read a mainstream article about a new technology that embraces the tech and understands it. Of course, it also helps when the article is written by a the editor-in-chief of the M.I.T. publication Technology Review. Jason Pontin offers a review of Twitter, which we’ve been playing around with here at LR:
My own experiences with Twitter were mixed. I quickly realized that decrying the banality of tweets missed their point. The only people in the world who might be interested in my twittering — my family, my close friends — were precisely the ones who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality.
But I also strongly disliked the radical self-revelation of Twitter. I wasn’t sure that it was good for my intimate circle to know so much about my daily rounds, or healthy for me to tell them. A little secretiveness is, perhaps, a necessary lubricant in our social relations. I wondered whether twittering could ever have broad appeal.
I believe it will have broad appeal, in the same way YouTube does: large numbers of people who create information that appeals to a small audience.
1 Comment Add your own
1. steve garfield | April 22nd, 2007 at 8:09 pm
I wrote about this on my blog:
This is a good example of a journalist missing the story. It’s like someone who writes a story on videoblogging and misses the fact that there’s a whole community underneath the all those videos on web pages.
I found out about this article from Twitter.
I’ve written how Twitter is the Future of News and how Twitter helped me navigate parties and panels, and organize events at SXSW.
Newmediajim is using Twitter to give us behind the scenes look at NBC TV production. It’s gotten to to watch a little NBC News.
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