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Today's WalesHome tweet

THE media’s (or mainstream media’s, if you prefer) fixation on Twitter seems unending. The microblogging service, now ranked as the 15th biggest website on the planet, has in the last week featured in stories from footballer Darren Bent’s departure from Tottenham Hotspur, to David Cameron’s alleged swearing incident during a radio interview.

Not to be outdone, a home-grown “twitoversy” also erupted here last week. WalesHome.org contributor Rene Kinzett and AM Peter Black’s meeting Tweeting at Swansea council drew scorn from fellow members and even interrupted proceedings. It is easy to dismiss this as early silly season media-generated twaddle (twittle?); Cameron’s comments, for example, arose from a leading question, and many celebrities know exactly what they are doing when they post newsworthy comments. But this is too easy, for Twitter and the Twitter phenomenon provokes strong opinions both for and against – and that suggests that it is more than a passing fad.

Before we get carried away it is worth noting that despite its prodigious growth, large swathes of society remain largely ignorant of Twitter. In findings that surprised nobody, a US study recently concluded that the Twitterati were ten times more likely be aged between 18-24 than over 65, although with a median age of 31, the average Twitter user is older than average users of Facebook and MySpace. It is also likely that a very significant proportion of the public will never tweet, although the capacity of Twitter to be delivered via SMS means that a far higher proportion of the public can access it than rival internet-only services. When we talk of a “phenomenon”, therefore, it is important to temper it with an acknowledgment that we are discussing a medium that will likely never have the reach or impact of television or voice telephony.

Nevertheless, there are those who do know about Twitter, and make a virtue of eschewing it. These refusniks question why reading about other people’s daily diets, commuting frustrations or TV preferences would possibly be of interest, and decry as sad and atomised those who choose to pass on such information. Some go further, condemning a socially destructive nervous narcissism in people who think that sharing their everyday experiences with the world is a substitute for meaningful interaction.

To Twitterers, these are criticisms borne of ignorance, and it is true that these critics (twitics?) do not, by definition, participate. But that does not mean they can be so easily dismissed. Many tweets are dull and unspeakably mundane. Many communicate a rather feeble cry for attention, rather than a noteworthy or insightful nugget. And – as shown by the twittering efforts of one or two AMs – some are clearly submitted out of a duty to be “in touch” than from a real desire to take part.

But the subjection of individual tweets, or even individual twitterers to this degree of critical appraisal is perhaps where the potential for mutual understanding goes awry. Tweets have the aura of a statement to the world because they are published in a format where the whole world can, if they choose, read it. But such is the volume and variety that they are better understood as more ephemeral; the small talk of globally mobile diasporas. One would not wander through a social gathering and deduce from the overheard trivial conservation that parties are a terrible idea populated by shallow, self-obsessed idiots, nor would one critique such comments as though they were intended to be “on the record”. Yet the same conclusions are often inferred from a five-minute visit to Twitter.com.

Such an analogy may mitigate Twitter’s low-grade and grammatically inelegant output, but it does not commend it. Yet it is worth sticking with, for the fact is that we do not go to any old social gathering, but to those that roughly match our interests and will feature friends, both actual and potential. The same is true for Twitter, where the practice of following and being followed is often far looser than, say, the maintenance of a Facebook friends network. In this way, we can listen to and participate in, the chit-chat of the web. Rory Sutherland, who also uses the analogy of a drinks party in this week’s Spectator argues that “the value of Twitter comes when you are overheard” but it is just as useful for overhearing.

Anyone who has tried to maintain a friendship separated by great distance knows that the carefully planned and executed rendezvous are often awkward affairs, shorn of rewarding conversation. This appears paradoxical; the time apart was, after all, spent generating experiences to be swapped. But without the trivia and small talk that comes from everyday, low-level interactions the wheels of these bigger conversations are not easily oiled. There is almost no other medium that supplies this semi-random collision of the mundane experiences. Letters are far too formal, while emails, texts and phone calls are by definition initiated with the express intention of making a point directly to the recipient. None fulfill the social urge to say a thing among friends or acquaintances, and be just as happy to see it disappear as to be picked up, noted without response or embraced with great vigour. Some of the interaction, in other words, we have with friends with whom we are prone to merely bump into, or encounter in the course of our normal lives.

All of which brings us back to the microblogging microcontroversy with which this article opened. As much as Cllrs Black and Kinzett claim to have been performing a civic duty, keeping constituents updated on proceedings in the chamber and so forth, the truth is that they were trying to be in two places at once. At the same time as their offline attention was called for in the formal deliberations of their local authority, their online avatars were busy drifting through their own social gathering, running into old friends, loose acquaintances and perhaps some new people. This is not to say they were remiss in their duties, merely that they were doing what so many of us do when we maintain our Twitter profiles; oil the wheels of our lives with the chit-chat that mobility, distance and time poverty too often denies us. That is not narcissistic or atomised, it is a basic and time-worn human need.