Twitter Logos
Twitter is all about false narcissism and acceptance, together in one package. The shallowness that comes with tweeting will be the reason it will be just a fad. As for its real communication value, that will simply be pushed aside by the next decent technological communication a short time a dozen these days. I give it two years’ max (possibly end of 2010 even) before it becomes thought of on the same term as land lines — still useful to many, but just only when the newer alternatives are inaccessible. Quantitatively, that’s a traffic ranking worse than 1,000 where a good online newspaper sits these days.
Seems the world is all a-Twitter these days. The site is mentioned everywhere. Everyone is trying to get on to it and incorporate it into their lives, business, communications plans, etc. It’s #74 on the Alexa.com traffic rankings at the time of this posting after a meteoric rise (click on the link to see Twitter’s ranking and history in playing around with a few options).
But a lot of people still don’t get it! What is the big deal with Twitter?
Well, there’s not really a big deal. It’s a fad that has some relative longevity compared to other recent technological fads, but ultimately, it’s a fad, and here’s why after a quick primer for those not familiar with Twitter, or who might not have thought about the psychology in it.
Twitter is basically free mass text messaging, 140 characters max at a time. You send it to everybody who signed up to “follow” you. There is a “personal” option to text individuals who follow you or who you signed up to follow. You don’t need permission to do either, unlike Facebook’s “Friend Request” where someone has to approve your request. This is the major difference to other most other social networking in existence and a key part why Twitter is successful. You can block people you don’t want following you. However, given the number of strangers lots of people have following them that they don’t care about and just let be, they can’t really prevent someone following them cause that person just creates some strange account and they’ll be able to follow you. Effective screening basically means you have to be relatively anti-social media, and that’s not often done with Twitter. People even sign up to follow others they don’t know just to see what they’re like, based on something or rather that whimmed them to do so. How else would you account for porn starlet Tiffany Mynx deciding to follow me on Twitter one day… even though it didn’t last long as by the time I knew it, she was gone.
The way Twitter allows users to organize themselves gives users two things which comes down to the best of cliques. That’s cliques, like groups of friends snobby to those outside them, not clicks like mouse technology. You have your own clique with those who follow you, and you belong to pretty much any other clique you like, including those of famous people who Twitter. Essentially, Twitter is hundreds of millions of cliques, and you can belong to any, removing the entry barrier cliques are known for as part of their identity. They are only still cliques because each user, including yourself, has one that nobody else can belong to until they sign up to join. Twitter gives you, the common person, both, narcissism and acceptance, all in one!
Imagine that! Narcissism and acceptance, in one thing! Where are you going to get something like that?
Answer? Nowhere. And that’s why Twitter won’t last long. It’s an illusion and people will either find a better solution or come to realize this, and abandon it.
That’s not people as a group per se. That’s people as to each his/her own. It’s about people moving away in any direction they choose, not a group migration to another common destination.
Twitter’s illusion of narcissism comes in the form that your clique isn’t real. They’re all following tons of other people on Twitter and unless you are really someone lots of people should listen to, you’re not all that important to them, either. And if you were, well, you wouldn’t need Twitter… and you won’t need it if the people aren’t there to follow you. Your clique is only real in your mind that your tweets mean something to them, whether all or just one. Even if you realize it’s the latter and it’s true most of the time in your case, it’s still narcissism to have it appear on everyone else’s board. True they did sign up to follow you, but it’s more the concept in the user’s mind rather than the logistics of how it came to be.
Twitter’s illusion of acceptance is based on false hope, not the kind that springs eternal, aka the type President Barack Obama is talking about. People let you into their clique, and you get to all these “personal messages” from them to the clique. It’s like being in the clique of that girl or boy whose clique you once wanted to be in and hearing them tell everybody something, except it’s via text and you don’t even hear their beautiful voice. Not yet, at least. Twitter might make it to voice one day if they can get it on fast enough before they die out. You are in that clique for the same reasons you wanted to be in those old cliques, so you can tell others about it, feel like you’re in their world and maybe even have some communication with that boy or girl, with other things being beyond that first hope.
Ashton Kutcher as he has on his Twitter profile as of the evening of Apr 16 (987,795 followers, 73 followed)
In Twitter, though, the first is nothing to brag about. If it mattered that much to me that you followed Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter feed, I could do the same. Ashton is trying to get 1 million followers before CNN does, by the way, current at 987,795 followers. Yeah. He really cares about you! That shallowness is the perfect example why Twitter will pass as a fad. Being in his world will just expose you to all those things you never dreamed about him in your vision of what he’s like. Finally, the chances you’ll get a tweet in response to yours… if he’s even following you, is a far longer shot than you’ll ever had with talking to that girl or boy once upon a time. He’s following all of 73 people, by the way. Um, can you say narcissism? Can you feel the love? But credit due, he’s at least honest as he can’t follow 987,795 people.
Note to Twitter, you could make it even more popular you’d let people become even more shallow so Ashton can follow all those people in return, but prioritize things so he only gets tweets from those 73 without any of his followers ever knowing. They can then brag Ashton’s following them in return to them following Ashton!
As for why people follow those with massive cliques, they hold out hope someone like Ashton might send them something one day, in a lottery mentality as I call it. However, with time, they will lose interest. It isn’t hard to get bored with something so impersonal as tweeting. Other tweets and something real in life is all it takes. Then the followers will go to someone else, and so on and on. But that might be it. It won’t take long before the game grows old.
Ultimately, you might just keep Twitter for a convenient communication means with your real life friends and family, but there are better ways of doing that, even. All this social media will grow tiresome to your fingers and suddenly, something like a phone call, or video call by then, might just seem very pleasant and refreshing. Everything you do with Twitter will be more possible and convenient with some other technology, even the ones today like a cell phone, and like many of the birds today, Twitter will become an endangered species. Quantitatively, that’ll be outside of the top 1000 websites so like a good (not great) online American “newspaper” source these days. Sadly, I can give Twitter a longer grace period than many of the birds out there today, but I’m going to go conservative and say 2 years max.
That’ll be April 2011, but officially, I’ll go for December 31, 2010.
Enjoy your life, Twitter! And try not to die bitter!
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Why do you think Twitter’s so big and how long it might be hot?
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Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 8.0
I agree wholeheartedly with the commentary re: Twitter. For the most part, it promotes a ‘sound byte’ life, narcissism and a delusional sense that one has real relationships with people. Along with a number of other social networking technologies, it seems to reflect the deep loneliness of this culture.
Thank you for your comment. Yes, it is a lonely culture out there, though it’s hard to figure out why. North American culture is so open, without all the taboos of severe social norms and expectations of other societies. Yet we still choose to be so lonely. I’ll leave that one to the professional shrinks.
I was going to do a post about Twitter and was doing some research when I came across this post. You hit the nail on the head and saved me some typing, I’ll just link to this page.
I’ve tried to get into twitter. I’m considered a hard core geek in my circle and always have to have the latest and greatest shiny toy, but twitter…just can’t get into it.
What I find amusing is the fact that we hear a lot of complaining about the lack of privacy on the internet and the invasion of our privacy in our daily lives. But on the other had we have this thing called twitter that’s all the rage. There’s seems to exist a contradiction.
I consider myself a private and humble person. The events in my life that I consider interesting I realize are not interesting to other people. Who cares that I have a cold, who cares that I hate waking up at 5:30am for work? I’m not that narcissistic to think that what occurs in my life is of any interest to anyone outside my circle. That circle consisting of the people I talk to on the phone or email.
Twitter is a flash in the pan that’s being promoted by the so called “web celebs”, which in my opinion is no better than a “reality tv star”. CNN and other media outlets are jumping all over just out of fear of missing out on the next biggest thing. I mean how long was the internet in existence before it got any major coverage?
I’ll stop here and get off the soap box….good post, you hit the nail on the head!
Wow, Dude!
That’s some reply! Thank you so much for taking the time to do it, show credible support and add some new insights to my post. I didn’t know about the West Coast celeb trend but you’re right! Also, the irony of wanting privacy and sharing so much personal crap is interesting, though I think that’s about control. If we feel we are in control, we’ll share whatever, from stupid tweets to sexting. If not, then whoa! We’ve got a problem, Houston! I mean, can you imagine if I were to be tweeting a friend’s life, taking their twunder away from them? But it’s OK if they tweet it, tweh?
I like your blog and your additional insight still, on the same matter, from your post. Many thanks again!
Not to beat a dead horse, but yesterday the blogs were ablaze with the story that Nielsen is reporting that the retention rate is about %40. Which is about what I am seeing in my circles.
This is from ars – http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/04/nielsen-report-twitters-explosive-growth-cant-sustain.ars
I’m still of the mind that twitter will continue to have a niche user base of people pimping their goods, movies, tv shows, news stories, or people so hung up on themselves that they think other people really care what they are having for dinner.
Thank you so much for this news. I hadn’t heard of it, being a little late on this one, so I appreciate you sharing very much. I agree with you about the niche user base. Twitter essentially will become a cult. I think by summer’s end, when we will be able to assess the Oprah effect on Twitter, we’ll know whether it’ll hit cult status by the end of 2010 like I predicted or even sooner. Regardless, it won’t last long and couldn’t become cultish soon enough for me. That said, while the world has to put up with it, I just wrote a post to help people generate better tweets. I mean, best if Twitter were not existent, but better for higher quality existence than the low state it’s currently in, right? Thanks again for the update!
Do you still think that Twitter is dying or that it was supposed to die by December 2010? Just curious, given its revolutionary use in some Arab countries lately….
Also, I noticed you use Facebook, and wouldn’t you say that Facebook is narcissistic-oriented as well?
Hi, thanks for the excellent questions! I knew I was going to have to deal with this someday.
I thought Twitter usage would be “old-skool” by the end of 2010, is what I meant by my article. That is, lots of people would still be using it, like MySpace and Flickr, a few years ago, but that it’d be just “noise” in terms of what’s going on in the world rather than something people get excited about. Without a full research effort, I’m going to stand by that view from what I’ve seen, some of which is a bit out of date, but I haven’t had any cause to think things had reversed itself.
Twitter traffic peaked in July 2009
http://mashable.com/2010/01/11/twitter-growth-stats/
This is a year old but what would have changed to reverse this trend?
Twitter growth peaked in Mar 2009
http://www.taranfx.com/twitter-usage-stats-2009-2010
It’s still growing, but how many abandoned account are there? I’ve got one.
As for revolutionary use? Which tweet drove a revolution? You get non-sense like “police coming to attack us” featured on CNN. What did that add to the story? Did someone not know? I’d have been running for my life rather than tweeting, but let evolution take care of people like that. I have never seen a tweet make a difference to a story unless the story was created from the tweet, which is usually stupid stuff people get riled up about rather than real news. In other words, there was no story without the tweet so the tweet made no difference to anything going on.
Twitter has reduced your 15 minutes of fame expression and mass distributed so more people get their 15 seconds of fame. It’s a lot of people screaming, and I say that cause most of them have about enough breath to scream 140 characters’ worth of a message, and they’re screaming into cyberspace for the most part cause for however many followers they have, how many are reading everything they say?
Twitter may be useful for some short messages when your signal is mostly cut off, but it’s still a few people who tell others what’s going on. When your signal is fine, it’s just noise. With 7% of the US population having Twitter, when it’s free, comparing that to 41% for Facebook, I wouldn’t say it’s wild. I’m still waiting for some major stations to wake up and realize it’s time to abandon Twitter for its lack of value to the station, and detriment for all the time wasted with it (reading meaningless tweets, repeating their own twitter address, etc.)
Personally, I’d rather listen to the birds tweet.
As for Facebook being narcissistic, it depends on how you use it, but you have a lot more variety to steer away from narcissism than Twitter. See this article I wrote
http://digitalcitizen.ca/2010/09/09/study-on-facebook-narcissism-and-insecurity-not-real-research/
I get the impression that you don’t want to admit you were wrong about your “prediction”.
Admit it or not, like I already mentioned, Twitter has obviously played an important and crucial role in some of the latest Arab countries’s revolutions. If Twitter had not played an important role in this case, it would not have been banned (just like it is strictly controlled in China or Cuba). That is common sense.
I really don’t understand your problem with Twitter. There may be a lot of “noise” in it, just like you have it in Facebook and so many other media, too, but a lot of today’s intellectuals and intelligent people use it to exchange up-to-date valuable information. That is really its revolutionary use: ideas start revolutions and lately ideas circulate mostly via Twitter.
Of course Twitter is useless when it comes to the chit-chat of people who narcissistically want to share with the world what they had for breakfast, etc., but obviously a good number of people use it with other more intelligent purposes.
For the record, I don’t work for Twitter, nor am I a “Twitter evangelist”. I just think your negative comments and “predictions” about Twitter don’t make any sense at all, because obviously you have some kind of irrational bias about it.
I was wrong in that I thought they’d stop talking about it on the TV networks and such. To that extent I was wrong.
Otherwise, the revolutions were started and sustained by Facebook, not Twitter. See any executives from Twitter in it? Heard anybody name their babies Twitter? One just got named Facebook. Twitter use stats did fall. New users flattened out. Both to levels that nobody gets excited about seeing any more. 7% of the population has it compared to 41% in North America when at the time I wrote it, people thought it was going to fly past Facebook. Lots of other Internet and telecommunications are also banned in China and Cuba.
Show me where Twitter’s made a difference like a Facebook event that started the revolution in Egypt (that was on CNN last night), and maybe tweet about it.
I didn’t predict it’d die. I predicted it’d be old skool like MySpace and Flickr was two years ago. Both were still going strong then, and still have lots of usage today… and rightly so. But big deal? Neh.
It’s good analysis with context, not irrational bias or ego. I’ve been publicly wrong before and I don’t stop being so for the rest of my life.
lol jokes on you
but seriously i don’t get why it’s still so popular it’s so dumb
Joke’s on me for this article, yes, but I’ve kept it alive to be fair and accountable. I think joke’s on all those users, though, wasting their lives away and getting distracted by all that!