Remember the scene in Star Wars (the very first one) when Luke and Obi-Wan are speeding away in the Millennium Falcon and Obi-Wan feels a sudden “disturbance in the force”? He hears a million voices cry out, or something to that effect. Now I’m not suggesting that Twitter is part of the force, but after about 24 hours of trying it out, I do feel like one in a million voices crying out into the void.

For my sins, I’ve been a fairly consistent web 2.0 consumer. I’ve been on Myspace, I’ve done YouTube, set up this blog and other blogs too, done pod casts, dabbled in a bit of video, got Flickr, got linked-in, etc etc. Social networking platforms are all about how much you put in, but I can’t say I’ve really gotten anything in return. So why do it? Well, it’s like television…you loathe it, complain about it, are advised to get rid of it, but end up watching Friends or something just as ridiculous. No matter how vacuous a past-time web 2.0 platforms may be, they are a facet of a growing ‘global’ Internet entertainment culture, which anyone with access to the web (still a minority of people in the world) will find increasingly hard to avoid.

Twitter is no different. Beneath it’s web 2.0 allure, of making ‘friends’, joining networks, sharing interests and creating the all-important avatar collection (the one with the biggest avatar collection is undoubtedly the best human, read Robert Scoble) it is even more empty than something like Myspace. Twitter consists of a simple text box, limited to 140 characters, into which you post answers to the question “what are you doing?” So you build up a collection of one-line messages, mostly notes to yourself, firing them off into the great Internet void with the usual web 2.0 hope of human interaction and recognition in an ever-dislocated world. Do you get it? Well, sometimes you do, if someone is reading your thoughts at the right time, but more often than not most ‘tweets’ go unnoticed.

I sometimes wonder, whether platforms like this are an early human attempt at ‘Borg’ syndrome – the idea of a collective mind to which all connected minds hear each other at once. Aren’t RSS feeds a rudimentary step in this direction? We have created technologies that allow us to live alone, we are global diaspora and we can sustain material life this way, but all current cultural evidence suggests a yearning for the close-knit societal model – a common mythology; partaking in rituals of flesh. Because, let’s face it, with Web 2.0 technology, we are as clueless as our stone age ancestors when it comes to answering the question of existence, but the fact that we stand more fragmented than ever before this question, makes it all the more heavy.

One astute tweet I read recently, entered by Jason Calacanis, read: “Who’s building a twitter/google adsense widget? I need to monetize this medium before Denton.” This is right on the mark. In paraphrase this would read how can I make money from Twitter? And yes, ultimately this is another money-making scheme, dreamt up by a group of well-trained, well-educated computer science students somewhere in California. The purpose is not to push the social experiment, but to use the guise of social experiment to push capitalist aspirations. It’s all about the money. Although, twitter won’t allow its users to place advertising as of yet, I’ve seen some innovative work-arounds, where users personalise their background image and add image-based advertising – less effective than a hyperlink, but still possible to generate some revenue.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 5:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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