Tweeting On Weekends: Are We Becoming Socially Anti-Social? (14/03 @ 9:30am)
For at least two years, my Twitter bio simply read “Shut up. You tweet too much”. While I may indeed be situated at the snarkier end of the web geek spectrum, it’s a motto I stand by. Twitter is a strong tool for communication and snappy messages, but with great power comes great responsibility. It was with this in mind that I made sure to sign up for the session on “overtweeting”.
The panel was a fairly random selection of people, including journalist Robin Raskin, marketers John Jantsch and Mark DiMassimo and host Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy. Bhargava kicked off by thanking the fairly sparse crop of attendees for choosing to attend, quipping that they were “competing with sleep, not daylight saving time”.
It fell to Jantsch to define overtweeting: “it’s like swimming in jello - something that you do because everyone else is doing it, and if you lose your way, you keep doing it” - a silly but useful analogy. Raskin reiterated that it was an issue of the quality of tweets rather than the question of whether to tweet at all. Her top tip for raising what she called a future “digital citizen” was to avoid invading other people’s time. This is what I was getting at with my “You tweet too much” mantra. While I’ve probably fallen into the tweetspam trap over the course of SXSW, ordinarily I avoid attempting to ‘liveblog’ things and posting tweets every minute. This reminded me in turn of Dan Mall’s comments at Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design panel yesterday where he spoke of his need to see a curated Twitter to filter out the noise.
Raskin went on to talk about education. Teachers are known for blocking Facebook and Twitter from classes, but she claimed the best teachers are the ones who integrate them as tools rather than completely tar them as distractions. “Smart people of the future,” she said, “won’t be the ones memorising state capitals but the ones that can sift through tons of garbage to find the champ”.
DiMassimo’s contributions were somewhat erratic as he stood up to make his first contribution, namechecking his own company for just slightly too long. He also made a bizarre joke about his “late night interactions with technology” that drew a few laughs but felt a little out of place in what was turning into quite a warm, community-feeling talk. The talk itself had evolved into an open Q&A, with audience members coming to the mic to offer their own thoughts or ask questions.
I got up to rant towards the end, mentioning my belief that Twitter allows users (particularly westerners) to apathetically ‘involve’ themselves in distant conflicts (like the disputed Iranian elections) and give themselves a big, congratulatory pat on the back for their general goodwill. I’ve blogged on this at length on my personal site, which I’m shamelessly plugging here. This drew a few appreciative nods from the audience but the panel were pushed for time and moved on. Bah. I still felt pleased I’d “spoken” at SXSW, though.
There were no clear solutions from the panel, but host Bhargava asked the audience in the final 10 minutes to tweet using the hashtag #overtweeting to suggest a way of cutting down on the number of pointless tweets. The best was a response from an audience member ike6 who tweeted “Call your mother and read her all of your tweets from yesterday”. This drew quite a lot of laughs, but made quite a salient point too. Bhargava quoted Clay Shirkey to sum up: “We don’t have information overload problems, we have filter problems”.
- Matt Andrews
