The Sacramento News and Review published a story by Alexander Zaitchik called “Why Twitter Sucks: Once harmlessly annoying, Twitter has become an undeniable player in the social-media landscape. Should we really fear the tweet?” I do agree with some of his points: there are a lot of meaningless posts (I’ve posted many myself), it’s completely self indulgent, it’s not the most eloquent form of communication and it feeds our rapidly shrinking attention spans. However, I think Zaitchik completely missed the mark on Twitter because he doesn’t seem to understand the communication potential of Twitter and the potential of “smart Twittering”. He doesn’t even reflect on “thick tweets” or “aeious” (already existing information optimally uploaded).
This is my posted response to Mr. Zaitchik: “I both agree and disagree with your assessment of Twitter. It’s terrifying to imagine a society that settles on communicating in 140 characters. Like you said, it marks the decreased attention span of the 21st century. However, there are smart ways to use Twitter. Like most new technologies, people use Twitter literally – what are you doing? However, the technology should not be limited to answering that question or composing 140 character diary entries. Twitter can be used as a platform to share work with a collection of followers. I write a blog, write and edit for my school paper and write for San Francisco Weekly. When I write a new article I send out a tweet, alerting people I’ve created new media. I wrote real pieces, 500 words or more, but I use Twitter as a platform to expose my work to a wide audience. My school paper uses Twitter to alert followers when we have new stories online and our views drastically increased when we started tweeting. I even found out about your story from someone I follow on Twitter. Don’t accept that a technology is bad from the lowest common denominator of users, there are people using Twitter in great and exciting ways.”
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Awesome response! It’s exactly what I would have said if I hadn’t been limited to 140 characters… oh geez.
Comment by Laura March 17, 2009 @ 2:29 AM