Tweets, twits, and the California earthquake

By John Cox on Wed, 07/30/08 - 1:20pm.

I've been reading a MG Siegler post at VentureBeat about how the 140-character Twitter messages (called tweets) began flooding through the Twittersphere within seconds of this week's earthquake, many of them generated by mobile users with cell phones; about how the Associated Press took 9 entire minutes before posting its first story about what had happened; and about how this is yet another "powerful reminder of Twitter's potential."

Potential for what, exactly?

Here is the first tweet on the L.A. earthquake, sent in its entirety, by "Vixy": earthquake

I guess that can qualify as "information" but it doesn't really qualify as "news." It barely meets Twitter's own minimal standard of answering the question "What are you doing?"

Please try to hold onto this thought: I'm not criticizing Twitter. I'm disagreeing with the pretensions of some Twitter users.

Siegler linked to a blog post by Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone, who says its another example of Twitter as "personal newswire."

Some of the posts to his blog entry disagreed, because that wasn't radical enough: Twitter is better than a newswire like AP they insisted. One wrote "Twitter is so much more than a news wire. It's faster, unspun, and most significantly, we don't participate on AP. We don't share and retweet each other on channel 4. We dynamically aggregate awareness with Twitter, and want to."

A lot of otherwise sensible people get gooey, and gooey-minded, contemplating real-time social networking. "Aggregating awareness" may confirm for someone who's never been in an earthquake that, yep, it was an earthquake alright. But awareness can be nothing more than first impressions, snap judgements, and bias: people who talk about the wisdom of crowds rarely seem to be aware of the potential for the foolishness if not madness of crowds.

(I need to finally get around to reading Elias Canneti's "Crowds and Power", which I have hunch might be relevant.)

Twitter doesn't turn every user into a citizen-journalist, an odd term for this activity, since both terms draw on specific cultural contexts, and therefore, meanings. If Twitter is genuinely new, then so must be its outcomes. But the outcomes, like all human outcomes, are mixed. Experience is more than neutered "information." So, in fact, is real information. Otherwise, you have what we've always had: gossip, guesses, speculation, trivia, and mere opinion on the one hand, and genuine news, insight, and wisdom on the other.

Many of the posters I've read on this talk about how they learned about the earthquake first on Twitter. It's striking that this is the value picked above any other by Twitterers, because it's the same value prized by the stodgey, clueless mainstream media, even the non-mainstream media like "Network World."

For many, it seems that they're satisfied summing up the dynamics of mobile social networking as Vixy did the LA event: "earthquake." The rest of us will have to wait patiently for meaning, like a flower, to blossom.