Chewing on Twitter (and not getting it).

It seems there are many people who are trying to grasp the inner workings of Twitter. Why are people so attracted to it? How can anything serious come from chatter? What’s the use of telling people all these puny little details about your life? Why do we need famous people to validate Twitter’s right to exist?

Dig deeper to be shallow

Let me ask a very basic question before trying to analyze the success of Twitter — or maybe, as a result, refrain from doing any such thing. What’s so important about things being useful? We are drawn towards fun, towards social interaction with other people. For some reason, we like to immerse ourselves in the giant pinball machine of the Internet and see what happens. This in itself seems reason enough if you ask me.

Don’t feed the vampires

We also tend to see the world as we are. So the people who respond in a reserved, conservative way to this Twitter thing are probably reserved, conservative people about other things in life as well. The Twitter lovin’ types will make an effort to explain what’s so great about it but the pitfall here is that reserved, conservative people get a huge pay-off for their attitude: attention. They have a knack for implicitly accusing you and without giving it any thought you start to justify your actions. So that’s an underlying dynamic of what’s going on in the Twitter related issues. These sounds would be silenced quite effectively by simply not feeding the interaction any more time or energy. It is, of course, imperative to make a distinction between the vampires and the truly curious who would like to hear first hand what’s so great about Twitter, but you’ll feel invited and enthused by these people.

Do the math

The brain is a supercomputer. As a standalone terminal it functions quite impressively*. If you hook up two or more machines its computing power grows exponentially. The Internet has, of course, already shown us the workings of Metcalfe’s law. And we know that sharing knowledge through the Internet helps us grow and learn faster than ever. Twitter adds a lot of contextual information to information and what’s even better: it removes the barrier called “time”. Instant access to hundreds of brains. Stop reading for a minute and ponder that. This amount of access to this amount of educated, curious, experienced, open-minded, interested, willing and sharing brains is unprecedented.

Empower play

Twitter lowers shields. It behaves as a kind of uniform that we all have to put on if we want to use Twitter- and that’s not a bad thing at all! Of course, reputation that has already been built is not “left at the door”, but we all become far more approachable, from rock stars to people with no worldly status whatsoever. The thing is that it’s not just fortunate it makes the rock stars more accessible, what’s even better is that it helps the geeks share their knowledge with us. It’s totally cool if you speak in oneliners (the oneliner, the better), people tend to value tweets quite equally if you ask me, so we all get to add our unique value, talents and intelligence to the collective. The more freely information can flow, the more vital the system. This kind of system is also constantly unstable, which is a good thing for learning and growing.

To some, the status or fame of someone validates the usefulness or enhances the “I should be on it, too-factor” of Twitter, but what largely characterizes the first generation of settlers on Twitter is a sense of equality. They are into helping eachother, sharing what they know and creating great intimacy by sharing great detail about their lives.

Returning the favor

Yes, people who tweet often share a lot. But have you ever experienced what it feels like if someone is listening to what you are saying? Let’s face it: it feels great. Not that it’s all talk- people on Twitter are continuously returning the favor by listening.  So you get to talk a lot and you get to listen a lot. I don’t want to get into the “selfish altruism” discussion, but to me this sounds like a well-balanced interaction that is generous and mutually beneficial.

Can’t play the piano and I love it

As a kid, what was more fun than just be confronted with an instrument you didn’t know and just pluck at the snares, push the keys or bang the drums and see what happens? It’s this kind of naive interaction with something that triggers our curiosity, gets us into an open “zone” and allows us to learn in a spontaneous way. A lot of learning is preconceived and boring as hell. Twitter is exciting because you get to bang the drums. Throw pebbles into that pond and see which ripples return in what way. Come up with approaches (“I’ll just play the black keys”) and try this out immediately. It’s a misconception that adults enjoy doing what they know how to do all the time.

By the way, the money?

In the process all this interaction and getting to know each other also results in doing business with each other. Simple as that, no rocket science. There seems to be an unwritten law on Twitter that if you push your business too eagerly you lose popularity and in turn lose the business you could generate with that. Through Twitter you are enabled to build trust, which is the basis of many business deals. The thing is you’ll really have to invest yourself and you can’t fool people into believing you are investing when in fact you’re just throwing some things at people to reap a reward. On the other hand, Twitter is also the place where people experiment with other forms of creating value and building an economy which renders traditional money useless. It’s exciting to witness and maybe even take part in this crafting of new models. Twitter itself was born from an idea and a need and accidentally grew very popular, without having any idea of how to exploit this thing.

Set sail some more

So … what’s my conclusion? No conclusion. I’m just going to set sail for unknown horizons some more, connected to Twitter. Learning, exploring, enjoying, giving, receiving, loving. Is it a chat room? Is it a universe of minds, interconnected and curious? Is it a microblogging tool or a beating heart of information and energy? Let’s find out.

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* From a quantum mechanical perspective there is no such thing as a standalone terminal, but we’ll leave that paradigm for another rainy Sunday.

Note: I’m always eager to learn more about the English language. Let me know if I’ve got my idioms, grammar, semantics or syntax wrong.