It would appear, according to my daughter who is a canny business woman, that I am being a tad too harsh about Twitter. She agrees that most of it is just babble, but for those who work for large corporations it is an essential tool to keep in touch with each other when working on large projects where information has to be rapidly acquired from other departments, or when at other sites or when on business overseas, as well as tracking those trends that were mentioned in the readings.
Soo, I have been doing some re-looking and re-thinking about the whole concept, and have come to the conclusion that it is like most things, useful when used intelligently and useless when used unintelligently. Big Business will find it useful as will Big Brother because keeping track of what people are thinking, doing and spending their money on, enables more informed decisions to be made at all levels of society - hopefully in everyone's best interests. I am allowed to hope, aren't I?
Similarly in times of personal, familial and social crises, short and to the point communication will help sort out some of the issues at stake.
As far as Big Bullies are concerned, they too will take from it whatever fits their agendas, but hopefully the very information they are acquiring will be the very information the other Big guys will be keeping an eye on so that their nefarious plans will be discovered and nipped in the bud!
Thus, like all new ideas and inventions, Twitter will find its niche in the continuing unfolding of the human story. As Tom Stoppard says, "The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in The Sovereign Individual refer to Frederic C Lane who pointed out that the average North American(and every other nation in the world) has probably lavished one hundred times more attention on O J Simpson (Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt) than he has on the new microtechnologies that are poised to antiquate his job and subvert the political system he depends on for unemployment compensation (and superannuation).
Something worth twittering about, I'd say.
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