Just read a spot-on blog post by danah boyd on how Twitter communication is frequently misinterpreted by laymen:
Far too many tech junkies and marketers are obsessed with Twitter becoming the next news outlet source. As a result, the press are doing what they did with blogging: hyping Twitter us as this amazing source of current events and dismissing it as pointless babble. Haven’t we been there, done that? Scott Rosenberg even wrote the book on it!
Yes, absolutely. We’ve been there and this is really just a rehash of the “relevance debate” we already had with blogging and that will probably stay with us for a long time. Communicating publicly used to be a privileged only enjoyed by a select few and bound to very clear codes and conventions. Now that the barriers have been removed, we are faced with the shocking revelation that other people do not, in fact, communicate primarily with us in mind. Duh.
I do however, disagree with danah regarding one minor point. People who seriously assign the category “pointless babble” to certain Twitter messages (based on what criterion, exactly?) are not researchers, they are “researchers” and they don’t produce studies, they produce “studies”. That’s why, in spite of all well-deserved skepticism, I think academia – ivory tower, arcane rituals and all – is a good thing. Because, for the most part, we try to figure out what’s really going on using actual data vs. simply telling people what they want to hear and then publishing the results in a glossy “report”.
