Two recent news articles about Twitter — one in the Baltimore City Paper (for which I was interviewed) and one in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — have finally pushed the mainstream media’s reaction toward social media beyond the standard “what does it all mean?” journalistic crutch and instead ask a more practical question: how do we maximize the potential value in this new form of communication?
Sure, microblogging may be “here to stay” (at least as much as any new technology can be said to be “permanent”), but how many of us are using it to create actual value and meaning for ourselves, much less to push the cultural envelope?
Don’t worry: we can’t.
Our Caveman Ancestors Would Be SO Pissed…
Until recently, technological innovation happened relatively slowly. Due to cultural, theological, sociological and legal restrictions, society’s advancement was always incremental. (When your days are spent scavenging for food, evading predators and fucking wildly so your species doesn’t become extinct, you don’t have much time to spend tinkering with that cotton gin.) The upside? Every new invention was allowed to simultaneously appear earth-shattering AND to stick around long enough to become fully integrated into modern society, its potential for change (and profit) being mined from every direction before the “next big thing” came along.
Now, technology has reached a tipping point where it evolves more rapidly than the average citizen can keep up with. Gone are the days when a fork, globe or sundial were the talk of the town; now, by the time you finally figure out what half the buttons on your cell phone are for, it’s obsolete and you have to buy a new one because nobody services that dinosaur in your pocket. Not that you couldn’t figure it out faster if you had more time, but since we spend the bulk of our days earning the income we need to afford last year’s innovations, our learning curves with new toys are distinctly mountainous.
With technology becoming ever faster, smarter and smaller, the sky’s the limit on what we can do. The problem is, that doesn’t leave us much time to figure out what we want to do, much less what we should do. It took the printing press the better part of a century to comfortably change the world, but the iPhone is less than a decade old and its first incarnations are already comical fossils; can you blame a guy for not trying to innovate with a tool that was antiquated on the day it shipped?
So when the mainstream media asks how we can maximize the potential of these tools — or when I lament people’s inability to truly rebel with them — we’re missing the point. Expecting society to do something amazing with Twitter is like expecting a caveman to artfully navigate the subtleties of a weedwhacker; let’s just be happy we can turn the damn thing on.
Tags: America, audience, common sense, history, perception, pop culture
