It’s bad enough that society is already suffering from M.D.D. (Media Deficit Disorder) – a modern day, technology led version of A.D.D. We can’t seem to do any one particular task well anymore, because we’re so busy juggling multiple things at the same time. Our attention spans have shrunk to the size of a newt. We can’t even seem to hold a thought consistently without drifting…….what was I saying again?
Now along comes Twitter, which totally reduces our collective thought leadership to 140 characters or less and in doing so, belittles and minimizes every big thought into a punch line or social limerick. It’s premature articulation if you ask me and it’s very unsatisfying. Even with products like Twerbose (seems like it was made for me) which tries to cheat on Twitter’s size limitations by linking to a (gasp) blog post of sorts, the problem still remains and isn’t going away anytime soon.
Amidst the Twitterfication of our lives, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend developing. Blogs are starting to fade into oblivion. OK, maybe it’s not *that* bad, but it’s a fade nonetheless. As someone who blogs, podcasts and has a video show, I can attest first hand that the leap from blogs to audio to video is like crossing a chasm – the level of difficulty, complexity and commensurate time investment grows exponentially with each step up to a richer form of communication, characterized by the adoption of additional senses and skills. But if this is in fact true, why am I (and many others like me) struggling to post as prolifically (quantity) and substantially (quality) as I once did?
If blogging is so easy, why are so many of the Web’s legends in their own minds on a blogging downward spiral?
The other day I wrote a simple post about the launch of one our client’s iPhone Apps. It took me about 45 minutes to post a simple multi-paragraph overview of the product, containing several links and 1 or 2 images.
“When did blogging become such a laborious and time-consuming task,” I asked myself as I painstakingly filled out the appropriate categories for my post, verified the desired time stamp for my post to hit, entered the relevant keywords and Technorati tags and previewed the post before hitting the publish button?
And then, as if a little tweeting bird whispered the answer into my ear, it hit me: The enemy is Twitter.
Over the past 3 years, Twitter has caused me to become increasing jittery, scattered and hyperactive. Twitter has turned everything into an elevator pitch. It has marginalized and trivialized everything profound in2 @n abbrv’d #tagline.
Twitter is to blame for my poor responsiveness on e-mail as well. I once used to type long letters on e-mail. I would take the time to read every word from every e-mail sent to me. And now I barely do either. In fact, the number of unread e-mails in my in-box grows by the day.
Twitter is to blame. I’m not sure why, but why not? It’s better than blaming myself, right?
In all seriousness, there has been a marked shift from blogging to “micro”-blogging and I wonder what we’re sacrificing in the process. I recently spoke with a colleague (Grant), who pushed back smartly by giving me a history lesson; comparing Twitter to Poetry and how society once shunned and chastised this short-form content as being nothing more than superficial eye-candy rhymes that drove us further and further away from the “Great American Novel”. He made a good point.
We mock what we don’t understand
We belittle what we have no reference point for
We criticize what seems foreign to us
I guess I have a problem with the idea that Twitter is comparable to blogging at all. Whereas Twitter is all about living in “the now”, blogging rides the wave of the long tail. Whereas Twitter is about concentrated real time conversation, blogging is about dialogue that is both distributed and extended. Perhaps the biggest problem is that Twitter has almost become an alternative to blogging and in doing so, sets up a confrontational “versus” zero sum choice, when in reality is simply has to be an “AND”.
Perhaps the real issue with the 45-minute-blog-post-that-should-have-taken-me-5 was that I was too busy tweeting at the same time, distracted every 30 seconds with a familiar Tweetdeck chirp that has since put the AOL “You’ve got mail” dude out of business.
I guess we’re a little too quick to cast doubt and blame the way of new ideas, innovations and technologies which we perceive to distract us through disrupting our routines, norms and the status quo of life, when in reality all we need to do is just get on with it, using our common sense and figure out how to incorporate new technology in an additive and complementary fashion versus a cannibalistic one.
So perhaps I need to turn the blame inwards, along with my lack of self-discipline, self-control and inability to just turn off the friggen Internets every once in a while. Or maybe it’s a good sign that all those prolific bloggers who are blogging less these days, are doing so not because they’re tweeting more, but because they’re too busy doing REAL work for a change. Not a bad thing at all.
I’d like to leave you with a Twimerick:
“How many failed whales constitute a school?”
Said a learned owl to a suspicious mule.
“I don’t want to chat,”
said the mule with an @
And ended up looking like a tool.
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