Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web. It’s not surprising, then, that these new tools deliver obvious social utility—Facebook is the best way to get in touch with old friends, and instant messaging is the quickest way to collaborate with your colleagues across the country. Twitter is different. It’s not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short “quips” on bathroom stalls. It’s a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience. That’s not to say it isn’t useful; to some people in some situations, Twitter is irreplaceable. But it is not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.

via The reluctant Twitterer’s dilemma. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine

This may be true, but this is no reason to swear off Twitter. Yes, I am blogging about Twitter, I understand the absurdity of it. But might it be valuable to introduce a new form of communication that has no direct antecedent? Doesn’t this just mean that it has untapped potential for a differentiation in our manner of communication? I’m not sold that twitter is completely useless, though I am sold on the idea that it is completely distracting. Thoreau made an interesting point on the telegraph:

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping, American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

On another point: there was a very interesting NYTimes article back in September that spoke to what sociologists call “ambient awareness,” which is, say, the awareness we gain of a person’s moods, health, etc, by sitting in the same room and consciously or unconsciously picking up on small, mostly non-verbal cues. Maybe your friend’s eyes are a bit red, or they are slower in responding than usual, seem sluggish, maybe there is just something about them that just seems different. The article compares the inundation of data we receive from social media to this sort of awareness. Granted, many people seem to view Twitter or Facebook as a contest in which you are required to make as many friends as possible, and this seems ridiculous to me, but as a tool to keep up with people you are sincerely interested in, it simply has no parallel or better in the past.

The communication media of the past had a more direct purpose of conveying an important piece of information: letters were written and rewritten so as to guarantee the truth and nuance of the prose, telegrams were studies in the economy of language, even an email is more important-information oriented than Twitter. Twitter is undirected communication, it is neither completely for someone else nor entirely for yourself. It allows for the harmless presentation of absolutely mundane details without the risk of wasting someone’s time who would rather be doing something else: “I ate a sandwich.” “My throat hurts.” “Celtics down already!” etc. The details are mundane, but may have the effect that a tv often does for people living alone: there are voices in the room. You gain an ambient awareness of those you follow. You can read a book, work on your thesis, etc, but there are voices in the room with you. Things my friends would find too mundane to tell me in an email are exactly the sort of thing they would mention on Twitter or if we were in person, just sitting down for a meal, or maybe watching tv together.

Furthermore, some people are truly masters of the short form: Felix Fenéon for instance wrote little more than tiny little stories based on the news of the day–which, incidentally, someone is posting on Twitter. Marshall Mcluhan also has a ghost-twitterer, and the form would make sense for any writer with a gift for terse, densely packed statements. As an illustration, here are some examples from NYRB’s collection of Feneon’s stories titled Novels in Three Lines:

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook, “Forgive me, Dad. I like you.”

The Oulipo did wonders with constraint. Michael Agger in Slate brings up the possibility of Twittering as a new sort of Zen Koan. Or what of Twitter as the possibility for a haiku?

old pond . . .

a frog leaps in

water’s sound

Which is all to say that the “lowered” level of discourse isn’t as bad as some would make it out to be. Sure, people will not always put in the thought to make a Twitter post as pithy as Oscar Wilde would (nor can we be sure Oscar Wilde wouldn’t be a boring person to follow on twitter), but the form is not to blame. It allows for both profundity and banality, both of which are valuable in equal measure. As for the banality of it: living in Scotland, I can keep up with my friends in the US, and they can keep up with me. I am privy to the small details of the lives of people I love, whether they happen to be witty (as they sometimes are) or just mundane (as most of our daily details are). Is that really so terrible?

And, in honor of my father who would always remind me when I was complaining that there was nothing good on tv that “It has an off button,” I will remind you that if you don’t like it, no one is making you use it.