Twittering in the Forest

I was a bit rude about Twitter in my last WSJ column (subscription only, I’m afraid), about the Web 2.0 satire Useless Account:

I can’t have an online conversation these days, for example, without someone telling me to use Twitter, a fabulously popular way to broadcast your current activity (and I mean current, as in “ear cleansing while waiting for YouTube to load”) to anyone interested, via your blog or cellphone. (Yes, I have signed up. No, I don’t use it much. Frankly, I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time, so the idea I’d actually be in a position to tell anyone else is unlikely. But how long will I hold out from using it? Probably not long.)

Of course, I’m probably on the wrong side of history here. Scoble et al love it. He has 469 followers (in case you have better things to do with your time, Twitter allows you to ‘follow’ other people’s twitterings, to basically see everything they write in their twitter account.

In fact, the ‘follower’ moniker is somewhat apt — Web 2.0 has become very religious, what with all these A list bloggers and product evangelists. People follow Scoble in the way they might have followed some mystic. (Of course I’m jealous! I’m not being followed by anyone except that mangy cat from the warung and some weird person who thinks I’m writing this blog for him.)

Anyway, Twitter probably tells us more than we’d like to know about this particular slice of Internet history. Robert says:

Anyway, I find I keep coming back to Twitter. It’s an interesting way to keep in touch with the lives of your friends, or followers, as it were.

It’s not as if this is not a bad idea. I’m into the idea of presence — being able to broadcast your availability so that those trying to reach you can fit their schedules into yours — and vice versa. Set your Skype note to “in a meeting and about to rush for a plane” and friends will know that you probably don’t want to yack on the phone about Britney Spears’ new hairdo. But Twitter probably takes this a bit too far — instead of it being a tool to fight distraction, as presence tools are — it becomes a tool of distraction, where one obsessively updates, and monitors others’ updates, to the exclusion of all else.

I prefer the assessment of Shawn Oster who suggests that in fact Twitter is about people feeling

they’re being heard. Everyone wants to feel unique and to feel like they matter, that they’re being noticed. Blogs are a great way to do that but now that there is more pressure to make your blog actually mean something instead of just an online diary people are looking for an easier way to still be digitally heard.

Probably truer than we’d like to admit. We’re firing these little messages out into space, and by building around us a network of friends and followers we’re feeling connected and noticed. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a reflection of what constant communication is doing to us: we don’t feel ‘validated’ unless what we’re doing is somehow observed and noted by others. The old tree falling in the forest thing, I guess: If no one heard it fall, did it make a sound? If no one knew we went out for milk and newspapers, did we?

I’m off to buy milk and newspapers and will report as much to my 1.5 followers on Twitter.