Twitter, participation and the pitfalls of observing
Paul Carr published a terrific opinion piece on TechCrunch about the pitfalls of the real-time web. In short: people are spending a lot of time in the land of meta, making note of their presence without actively participating. Or, as he puts it, “LOOK AT ME, LOOKING AT THIS.”
It’s a great point, and one worth contemplating. Sites like Twitter actively encourage such activity. Indeed, Twitter utilities like Tweepi actually give people extra credit for posting more links and retweets and less original content. Somehow, connectedness doesn’t include originality.
At the same time, social media has its logical limits. The old joke, that no one needs to know what you had for lunch, is probably true (unless you’re, say, Sam Sifton). Sooner or later, we’re going to crave a hierarchy: content creators, the doers and the makers, will need to rise above the redundancies and inanities. But then, we’ve been saying this about the Internet since the rise of Geocities, and we’re still here. Let’s see where this goes.