Microblogging- the Next Step in the Communication Revolution
I’ve been a big user of Twitter the past few months, using the service to post short thoughts about sports, food, politics, and music, among other topics, while interacting with tons of people about my opinions and theirs. It’s like no other tool I’ve used, which explains its growing popularity. I recently came across the following quote, from Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s book New Rules for the New Economy about our information economy:
The new economy is about communication, deep and wide. All the transformations suggested in this book stem from the fundamental way we are revolutionizing communications. Communication is the foundation of society, of our culture, of our humanity, of our own individual identity, and of all economic systems. This is why networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it are beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle. Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural, technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of our lives.
In thinking about Twitter and microblogging, I realized that such services will significantly impact how we communicate and share opinions and information with each other in the future.
The ability to disseminate written information and opinion to a group of people is tremendously powerful and valuable. Throughout history, this ability has gradually been available to more and more people. Blogging caused a pretty large shift in the axis of control (limiting access to individual broadcast ability), as millions of people gained the ability and platform to easily express and share their opinions with others. However, to this day blogging is still cast aside by a large majority of internet users, who view the generation and posting of long-form content as a burden and would rather interact through social media. Microblogging, meanwhile, so significantly lowers the barrier to entry for communicating to a group of people, and is such a natural activity, that everyone will end up doing it. The short-form nature of the content, while a hindrance to some, is actually a welcome restraint for most people, who might not have 500 words to say about everything they have an opinion on. Now, instead of going through the hassle of positing well-thought theses and posting long-form ideas to share their feelings, they can simply express their thoughts, easily conveying and sharing them with thousands of other people. Fred Wilson talks about the 21st century social media revolution, which entails “every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet”, and I’m right there with him. We will simply have the largest open repository ever of information about people’s explicit interests and opinions (up till now, much of that information has been hidden in implicit actions like clickstreams and search data, visible to only a privileged few corporations that collect it, like Google and DoubleClick). What are the implications of this? I believe this will be tremendously powerful in a cultural sense.
Everyone gets a chance to be heard. Nowadays, when you search about something, you may get many results, but they are still all from a few “sources” more or less- popular news outlets, information platforms like Wikipedia, and maybe a few blogs here and there. In its current incarnation, search is still powerful enough to give us a very good idea of the general sense of things— we understand an issue as seen by a few (relative to the billions in our global population) people. Services like Summize (now Twitter Search) have been building tools to analyze popular sentiment across the internet, scouring blogs and news articles, and could be valuable in helping understand general public opinion. Now, imagine something like that which didn’t just look through a few hundred news sources (many simply repeating each other), but rather analyzed the explicit, stated opinions of millions of users. While of course that has significance to the business/advertising sector, I see this being one of the most important political developments in history— the ability to easily share your opinions in an open forum, and be heard. If governments, businesses, and other concentrated power groups were forced to use such tools and meet the demands and expectations of the people, it would be a huge step towards a truly democratically functioning society. We’ve already begun to see this happen, such as in the 2008 presidential elections which made great use of social media tools, but microblogging has not yet risen to the role of prominence that it will occupy in our society.
The internet, as it currently stands, is already the easiest and most powerful platform for personal expression and mass influence we’ve ever had. The emergence of tools like Twitter shows how we’re still at just the start of the revolution.
Update: Fred Wilson echoes these thoughts in a February 10 post:
“… there is no absolute truth, just your truth and my truth. I post my truth here everyday and I hope you’ll drop by and share your truth with me.
This is the promise of social media. It’s revolutionary. When you give every citizen in the world a printing press, you ought to expect revolution. And it is upon us […] We’ve moved past the time when big institutions controlled what we read, what we thought, and what we believed. And we are arriving at a new place where each and everyone of us will report on our world and share it with others. Sharing is the new truth.”
