What Twitter needs

The internet is nothing if not a venue for complaint, so I will go ahead and do just that regarding Twitter:

There is no accounting for the frequency of tweets from people you follow. So you get a problem where frequent tweeters drown out the not-as-frequent tweeters, and you end up having to take into account tweet-frequency when you're deciding whether to follow someone. Which seems wrong.

What would be nice is if you had not one stream but two or more, where the frequency of tweets determines which stream you fall into (the high-frequency stream or a lower-frequency stream). That way you wouldn't get the drown-out problem.

Of course, I understand that Twitter is totally open so all it would take to implement this is for someone to make a website that does it. So I guess I'm saying: make it???

Why Twitter is so unreliable

Much ink has been spilled over the unreliably of the torrent of Tweets coming out of Iran, but I just want to point out that, specifically, what keeps Twitter from being a good source of information is that sources cannot be independently confirmed. Which is to say, normally, if multiple, separate sources tell you the same story, you can be pretty sure that what they're saying is true--their stories are mutually corroborating.

Of course, this doesn't work if the sources had an opportunity to collude before you could question them, for the obvious reason that they could have agreed on a lie.

Because Twitter allows everyone to see what everyone else is saying, it allows all sources the opportunity to "collude"--there are many voices, but none of them have the power to corroborate what any of the other voices are saying.

So the irony here is that the very ease of information sharing is what is preventing us from getting reliable information. I wonder if there's some clever way you could get around this? One thing that comes to mind is that videos and photos can corroborate each other via their metadata: if two different videos depict the same event, and they both purport to have been taken at the same time and place, then that is good evidence that the metadata is accurate, simply because it is unlikely that a person has the wherewithal to alter the metadata on his video to be similar to one that is already posted on the internet somewhere--it would be a difficult thing to "collude" on.

The drawback here, though, is that videos and photos are not tagged with metadata in a standard way (I don't think), so we aren't able to do this analysis (it's not like the date and location of the video/photo is contained in the file header (again: I don't think)). But I think you could really get somewhere if the metadata were in place.

(Photo by carrotcreative)

If Iraqis could Tweet, would we be so cavalier about bombing them? We might, if they Tweeted all the time, for no good reason.

Although I disagree with some of the phrasing that he uses--clearly, even those who favor bombing Iran do not do so because they "want to slaughter" innocents, as he seems to imply at one point--I think Glenn Greenwald makes a very, very good observation:

Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many -- obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game.

Humanizing is right. Although it's a bit of a cliche at this point to refer people to the #iranelection tag on Twitter, I think it actually shows pretty well how these social networking sites enable Americans to become exposed to--and emotionally invested in--whole groups of people who would otherwise remain foreign and abstract.

It makes me wonder, a bit, how things would have been different if Iraqis had been able to communicate this effectively in the run-up to the war in 2003. Suppose that when their homes and neighborhoods were bombed, they emitted a steady stream of horrifying pictures and videos? Suppose that they directly entreated us to stop raining death down upon them from above with Facebook groups and hashtags? Even as I write that it seems kind of dumb, but, still: isn't there something very powerful about one person saying to another, in whatever medium: please don't kill me and my family?

The post title is a paraphrase of a great Jack Handy line, that questions whether we would be so quick to cut down trees, if they could scream. Unfortuneately, I have a feeling that the same principle applies to people. Before the internets, it would have been nearly impossible to have any kind of meaningful, personal, and affecting interaction with someone on the other side of the world--and, as a consequence, the snuffing out of tens, even hundreds of thousands of lives would enter into our brains as bare factual information. Psychologically, we wouldn't "hear the screams".

So maybe this is the "Kantian turn" in the ongoing discussion about what, if anything, the role of sites like Twitter are playing in the Iranian civil unrest. The change isn't taking place within Iran; it's taking place within our brains.

(Photo by natachaqs)

Arrrrgg!

I've been saying this for years--but I never thought to put it on Twitter!

I'm ordering an immediate investigation of all jokes I've ever made to see if they can be put on the record.

NYT to add Twitter section alongside Sports, Business, etc.

Another Twitter article! But I take exception to this:

“Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”

What about making jokes?

The affable stupidity of the internet

I think what makes this post (via Kottke) so great isn't the subject matter, necessarily--which seems to be a fairly run-of-the-mill meme--but how well researched it is. I especially like their tracking of the McGangBang phenomenon through various forums, "sprouting out from the passionate subcultures of video gaming, sneaker-lovers, and car enthusiasts".

On a related note, it never quite struck me before that internet memes often exhibit properties of absurdist exquisite corpse games like telephone: little touches or variations get added in, like the political theme that inexplicably accompanied the McGangBang's presence on MySpace.

I will close by doubling-down on the web-2.0-obnoxious-quotient of this post by citing a relevant tweet from @strutting:

I wanted a site that tracks the latest 4Chan trends so I wouldn't actually have to read 4Chan. Then I realized that site is The Internet.

Okay I'll stop now.

Twitter

I started. So far it's actually making me a little nervous, because I'm unsure how often I'm supposed to--er, tweet--and I don't want to spam people with boring messages. But I suppose I'll get the hang of it soon enough.

By the way, I don't know who he is, but I hate this fucking guy. Every other message from him is really, really funny.

PS: Lisa, if you're reading this, can you hook me up with a AAA battery? Thx

Oh for Chrissakes

Some insufferable bastard proposed to his girlfriend on Twitter, and the two of them couldn't be any more satisfied with themselves about it:

Rewis proposed to Sullivan via Twitter shortly before midnight March 2: "@stefsull - ok. for the rest of the twitter-universe (and this is a first, folks) - WILL YOU MARRY ME?" Sullivan's reply: "@garazi - OMG - Ummmmm... I guess in front of the whole twitter-verse I'll say -- I'd be happy to spend the rest of my geek life with you."

"Twitter-verse"? Really?

Jesus Christ.