The tweeting about Twitter simply will not cease. A cousin of mine, who is a good generation younger than me, is now following me on Twitter. We are already "friends" on Facebook, and our moms are sisters, but evidently that isn't enough to make us really "connected." We now have to follow each other on Twitter.
A few weeks ago, I mused about possible applications of Twitter as a marketing tool. I still think there is value to using Twitter as a marketing device -- if properly used.
But I've had doubts about its benefit to those human beings in need of community -- a community without which marketing itself would likely fail as an enterprise.
Twitter is awfully interesting. I tweet several times a day sometimes. Most of the time, the posts I read are not relevant to my life (or other people's lives). They rarely offer a depth of insight on a given subject. But they are sometimes interesting, funny, or just downright cute. One fellow I follow posts only things his kids say. Every once in a while there is a link to an article, video, or some other bit of bytes that leads me to the kind of depth and insight that Twitter -- due to its character constraints -- lacks.
Will Twitter hurt how we think and, thus, act, and in turn change how we market to one another? Maybe. The structure of our language -- even our syntax -- dictates how we think; it forms the way we conceptualize, how we articulate the world, and what we think is in the world. Twitter's atomization of human expression means that marketers are faced with the prospect of trying to wedge in on even smaller pieces of communicative action, which ostensibly offers waste-free interlocution.
To achieve this, syntax has to be simplified, while at the same time maximizing its semantics; that is, the letters or symbols we use have to represent even greater sets of meaning. To do that, we have to break down structures we are all familiar with and establish new ones. Forget the challenge this poses to marketers -- think of the challenge this poses to the average human being who has spent the entirety of his or her conscious life learning and using the language of their community.
It could be said that the Twitter community knows that language, or it is quick to learn it. I suppose that's true. But is this new set of signifiers adequate to those things that we seek to signify? Or, more importantly, do we abandon structures already in place that work better for the sake of convenient simplicity?
Americans -- and those of us working on the cutting edge of marketing -- frequently give up the last old thing that was working just fine for the next new thing that still doesn't have all the bugs worked out.
My concern is that the diminishment of formal structure will lead to structure's eradication for the sake of utility.
In an environment where "infosnacking" and reflex replaces deliberation and practiced experience, defining intelligence and reason will become unrecognizable.
The bulk of Twitter posts seem to express the notion that if people don't know what they are doing or thinking, we are afraid that we are not doing or thinking anything. A Flash movie on Current.com hilariously points to this unspoken instigator of Twitter's popularity. "The Daily Show" also had a great bit with Samantha Bee articulating similar sentiments. The microblogging of minutiae that Twitter enables is a symptom of a syndrome of modernity -- our sense of isolation that results from the overindulgence of media consumption in order to overcome our sense of isolation.
As we live even more frictionless lives -- no longer struggling for physical survival, every thirst quenched, every appetite sated, every desire fulfilled -- we can live in ever-increasing isolation because we no longer "need" people to provide for us, except psychologically. It turns out that we still need to have our existence affirmed, and the postman delivering our Amazon order, or the Chinese migrant delivering our Schezuan dumplings, isn't enough to do that. Being "public" is how we let ourselves know we are alive.
Media frequently sets us off from experience by representing experience to us, leaving us with a sense that those experiences don't need to be had ourselves. Most media today move us from being participants in experiences to witnesses of them, once, twice, or thrice removed.
The increasing facility available for individuals to participate in media (e.g. blogging, tweeting, uploading videos of their cats) is not having an experience. It is at best a surrogate for experiences, but it provides the illusion of participation. To blog about how outraged you are about a political policy, about an injustice carried out against an innocent, or about how the "Don't taz me, bro!" guy was mistreated or got what he deserved, is not an action. It is physically no different than buying something on eBay or surfing porn. (Lee Siegel articulates this notion very well in his book, "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.")
But put aside all the grand metaphysical implications of Twitter and other "new, new things." My point is that Twitter, like email, is great for moving bits of data, little tiny pieces of information, but it is not an experience, and it is not a conversation. Twitter's power as a tool for marketing may be found to be more like search; it's great for pinpointing wants and needs, but terrible for building a relationship.
Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company.
