If you feel like blogging has taken on a mind of its own, you should get to know the new rage in social application software. It’s an internet tool called Twitter that let’s you post brief updates about your everyday thoughts and activities. They are posted by the minute to the Web via browser, cell phone, or IM. It’s blogging taken to a new extreme level. Twitter’s constant-contact medium allows friends or just anyone to know where you are and what you are doing minute to minute. Why has this new medium become the rage?

With Twitter’s rabid fans doubling every three weeks, it has gotten a lot of attention. An article in the July, ‘07, Wired magazine, Clive Thompson describes twittering as brief postings limited to 140 characters that “lean toward pithy, haiku-like utterances”. Some of the postings are “Doing lunch and picking up father-in-law from senior center”. Therefore, most Twitter messages are “stupefyingly trivial” and mundane. However, with most users being between 18 and 27, it allows them a method for keeping track of their “posse”. If you want to know where your friends are minute to minute, what they are feeling, and when to hook up, then Twitter is for you. There are those Twitter users who claim that they begin to develop almost a telepathic awareness of the people most important to them by receiving dozens of updates a week.

Thompson also likens twittering to a form of proprioception or your body’s ability to know where your limbs are moment to moment. It is a subliminal sense of orientation that is crucial for coordination. So, he compares Twitter to it in that it is a constant-contact media that creates “social proprioception”. It allows for a group of people to have a constant sense of itself allowing for extensive communication and coordination. Some users report it being like ESP, in that you know what your friend is feeling at all times by the types of updates he or she posts. So, you will know when someone is overloaded or too busy to meet for lunch or maybe just bored.




I find it intriguing that since we are losing the real human connection to this digital version of social interaction, we have become nearly obsessed with trying to connect to another entity. While trying to create a substitute for this missing human connection, we are losing almost all substance to what we are saying to each other. In the end, we end up trying harder and harder to connect getting farther and father from what we really want.

Thompson states that this may just be another new toy-in-waiting for the next high-tech gadget. But then again, he says it’s sort of an experiential thing in that you have “to do it” to appreciate it (I will just take his world for it though). He describes it as a “tactile sense of your community that it is simply too much fun, too useful — and it makes the group more than the sum of its parts”.

If you would like to check out this new form of communication on steroids, go to Twitter.com. Maybe you’ll just find it as fascinating as those other “twitterers” out there.