Twitter and Being Human
My mentor, Doug Engelbart, is famous for asking, “How can tools make people smarter?” I’ve seen him ask audiences that question over and over again over the years, and it always results in a rumble of approval and often standing ovations. I’m always both amused and troubled by this response. Why should we get so excited about a basic assertion of our humanness? How did we become a world where we spend more time trying to make our tools happy than the other way around?
I was reminded of this when my friend, Evan Prodromou recently microblogged:
Cover of “Entrepreneur” caught my eye in the airport so I bought it. Barfed a little in my mouth while reading this: http://ur1.ca/22zs
Evan’s mini-onset of nausea was caused by an article by Guy Kawasaki about Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging tool that has exploded in growth over the past few years. Lots of people are using it, and even more people are trying to understand it.
Kawasaki suggests that having lots of followers can be useful, which is certainly true. He then offers advice on how to create such a following. For example:
Send @ messages to the smores [social media whores]. They probably won’t answer you, but that’s OK. You just want to appear to have a relationship with them. The theory is, “If she’s tweeting with @scobleizeer, she must be worth following.” It’s BS logic, admittedly, but it helps. To bastardize what a famous PR person once told me, “It’s not who you know. It’s who appears to know you.”
Here’s another gem:
Follow everyone who follows you. Some people will respond to you and everyone who follows them will see this–which is more exposure for you.
That said, when you get to more than 50 followers, it’s impossible to read what all your followers tweet. Then you have to focus on direct private and public messages.
Let’s put aside the question about building a following for a second. Do you really want to be the kind of person who stalks pseudo-celebrities so that others will associate you with them? Do you really want to be perceived as someone who talks to lots of people, when in reality you just want to interact with a select few? Do you really want to shift away from who really you are in order to build up some artificial ranking on a random piece of software?
Good tools, when you let them, allow you to be more human, not less. They allow you to be your authentic self. Twitter and Evan’s excellent open source competitor, Identi.ca, are good tools. Contrast Kawasaki’s atrocious advice with Kevin Cheng’s outstanding post on why he used Twitter:
To me, Twitter and Facebook updates represent the mundane, everyday conversations that I could and would have with everyone if I could. By seeing the stream of updates from my friends, I have much more context into their lives, and a feeling that I can converse with them about smaller things. To use a clichéd term, I feel more connected to them.
When I see these friends, even after many months apart, I still feel like I’ve been talking to them and keeping up with them to some extent. Conversations flow more naturally and are much more rooted in the present than trying to bridge the gap since we last interacted in person.
This is the essence of a social tool. This is why you should use a social tool. Tools should enhance, not detract from your humanness.
OK, now I feel guilty for intentionally not revealing anything personal on my Facebook interactions. Think of all the conversations I’m missing out on!
It’s a trade-off, and I don’t think there’s a clear right way to use these tools. When you open yourself up, you make yourself vulnerable, but you also open yourself to the possibility of support and learning that would not otherwise be possible. The key is to embrace your fear, but not let it be an artificial obstacle.
Good post eek, but I’m unable to make sense of your first paragraph. What is the assertion people are getting excited about? You open quoting Doug’s question, which presumably implies some assertion, but which?
The assertion is that tools should serve people, not the other way around.
One thing I wonder is how well it all works for people in the business world. “Be a big fake jerk” seems like terrible advice for young entrepreneurs — especially those entrepreneurs who hold their online
Guy Kawasaki doesn’t _have_ to fake his way into relevance, but what if someone else does? Would the insincerity show through and backfire on them, alienating potential clients/partners/investors?
Isn’t the primary benefit of a chatting application like Twitter/Facebook who else is on it, as opposed to the particulars of the tool itself?
Great people is a prerequisite for great collaboration. However, how they interact matters also.
One thing I tried to point out is that even if the interactions seem somewhat trivial on Twitter and Facebook, they matter, and they affect how we work together.