katy lindemann // seemingly unconnected

The blogosphere’s been buzzing with commentary on the latest ‘OMG Twitter!!!’ article, this time a Time cover story – How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live (ignore my cynicism – it’s worth a read). It observes that lovely though the ambient awareness of others’ daily lives that regular status updates afford us are, the more interesting application of Twitter is in the way it can add a second layer of dialogue & bring a wider audience into exchanges which would have previously been closed – delivering a “super fresh” web of real time conversation.

Wired’s Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought takes this one step further, exploring how these new ways of communicating may actually be changing the ways we conceive and develop thoughts and ideas:

The most important thing about [Twitter] isn’t the messages themselves — most of them are admittedly banal — but the form of the message: 140 characters or fewer

If you want to understand how and why that matters, think about another textual medium — the book. For the last 2,000 years of Western culture, the book has been the ideal, default form of the written word — the organizing shape of thought, the fundamental unit of knowledge — and no one should expect the humble 140-character tweet to take its place. But the invention of the book was world-changing not because it made possible the kinds of extended thoughts that fit that shape … but because it gave them a radically expansive new form, allowing us to mass-distribute, study, catalogue, cross-reference, and otherwise get them out of our heads and into the world in powerful ways not previously imaginable.

And just so, too, by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.

NYU professor Jay Rosen talks about “mindcasting” – whereby the germ of an idea may be tossed out in a tweet (vs a fully formed blog post or think piece), and then shared, picked up by others, and thus critiqued, reshaped and developed in the process.

Nick Carr’s controversial piece in the Atlantic last year (Is Google Making Us Stupid) argued that our habitual consumption of bite-sized content online is shallower than the more intense and sustained consumption of long-form content from printed books, which in turn has a detrimental effect on our cognitive abilities by diminishing our capacity for concentration and contemplation.

Whether or not Carr turns out to be right remains to be seen – there’s no conclusive proof either way (although a UCLA study found that amongst older adults, web searching actually appeared to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that’s not activated during reading). And we all know that sometimes we need to knuckle down and focus on a task where we need to block out other distractions – where continuous partial attention simply isn’t appropriate, hence shutting down Twitter and avoiding checking email allows us to focus our minds. But by the same token we can also get great mileage out of the nuggets that tools like Twitter allow us to access – then spread, share and reformulate into longer form blog posts and think pieces:

It’s not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven’t always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It’s just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.