Happy New Year. I decided to take a break from blogging over the holidays, figuring a reboot would be beneficial. Frankly, my blogging had suffered because of Twitter. For me it began last year as a kind of adjunct to blogging – a place to throw out observations, stray fragments of ideas, etc. But then it morphed into something a little bigger than that – though what, exactly, I can’t quite define. Sometimes it was pure procrastination, frivolity, fun. Other times, Twitter became a kind of field for cultivating bloggable ideas, or ideas for journalism, or about the nature of journalism itself. It became not a distraction from other things but an end in itself. But was this ultimately *useful* – a waste of effort or an investment in something? And if it was the latter, what was I investing in?
This is about the nature of reading and writing today. Of course these activities are ever more interactive, more immediate, and, er, shorter in duration than ever before. They are ever more likely to involve direct give-and-take with others in real time. The “investment” is not just in self-expression, in reporting facts or disseminating ideas effectively, but it’s also in the iterative process itself – how the social network feedback shapes and reshapes your thoughts.
It’s endlessly alluring, the long braid of thoughts and observations, and the capability to weave yourself into it. It’s funny, dramatic, provocative, weird. And the Twitterverse is vast and spans more geographic and intellectual area every day. But because it’s a conversation among millions, it is also not terribly deep. It is enriching in some ways, not in others. Social networks are self-selecting, so the conversations trade on shared attitudes and assumptions that may go unchallenged. There isn’t much opportunity for rumination; it’s hard, for example, to craft an argument or in 140 characters (though a worthy challenge to try). The key is knowing when to dive in and when to step back and reap some of the dividends of Twitter by plowing them back into other forms – and vice versa.
