Dual Perspectives

For those of you increasingly convinced that you're the last human alive who doesn't get the point of Twitter, I have comforting news: Nobody does. Not really. Sure, the twittering masses (17 million registered U.S. users, by latest count) have some idea what their habit is good for. For many, Twitter's steady stream of one-line updates — "microblogging," as the form is known — is a low-maintenance way to feel connected to family, friends, celebrities. For others, it's a marketing tool, a public diary, a communal news feed, or even, simply, a sort of brain game — a text-message Sudoku, where the daily challenge is to fit the maximum amount of cleverness into the minimal space of a 140-character limit. But knowing how people use Twitter isn't the same thing as knowing why they use it. And that turns out to be a puzzle even seasoned Twitter watchers have found difficult to crack.

The quandary is this: Most of the uses Twitter has been adapted to were already well-served by existing online tools — blogs, email, instant-messaging — and it's not entirely obvious how the subcompact message lengths and other constraints of microblogging represent an improvement. Identifying Twitter's comparative advantage, in other words — the compelling, real-world need that it alone among social media best fulfills — is hard. So hard that a recent blog post by legendary web-tech guru (and avid twitterer) Dave Winer all but conceded Twitter's core appeal might remain forever shrouded in the ineffable. "There's something there," wrote Winer. "The challenge is to figure out what it is."

Should that challenge ever be met, however, not everyone's convinced we'll find a lot of there there. "I think there's a question whether Twitter is going to be the thing everybody does, in the way that using IM or cell phones is," says Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate. Broadcasting one's personal status on a regular basis, after all, may not be for everyone. "It's a very alien concept," says Manjoo, and while he's not inclined to write Twitter off as a fad — the CB radio of the '00s — he's not entirely convinced that what remains of Twitter's popularity once the hype has settled will prove it something bigger than a niche pursuit.

But here's a concept: What if the reason no one's figured out why Twitter matters is that it's bigger, in fact, than anyone's imagining? Sure, it's easy to dismiss Twitter because of the content — the endless stream of latte orders, flight delays, mood swings. Who cares? But that would be a mistake. Early critics of the television also wrote it off as a time waster with few redeeming social or cultural values: the boob tube. But TV became a powerful change agent regardless of, or even in spite of, the programming. The medium was the message.

The same lesson applies to Twitter. The most important thing about it isn't the messages themselves — most of them are admittedly banal — but the form of the message: 140 characters or fewer.

If you want to understand how and why that matters, think about another textual medium — the book. For the last 2,000 years of Western culture, the book has been the ideal, default form of the written word — the organizing shape of thought, the fundamental unit of knowledge — and no one should expect the humble 140-character tweet to take its place. But the invention of the book was world-changing not because it made possible the kinds of extended thoughts that fit that shape — the sweeping, complex species of utterance we recognize as "book-length" in everything from Gone With the Wind to The Origin of Species — but because it gave them a radically expansive new form, allowing us to mass-distribute, study, catalogue, cross-reference, and otherwise get them out of our heads and into the world in powerful ways not previously imaginable.

And just so, too, by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.

What new cultural forms and institutions may emerge from this development could be as hard to predict as all the consequences of the book have been. But for one of the more intriguing examples, consider the emerging Twitter practice NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls "mindcasting." It may begin as just a seed of an idea — a thought about the future of online media, say — tossed out into the germinating medium of the twitterverse, passed along from one Twitter feed to another, critiqued or praised, reshaped and edited, then handed back for fleshing out on a blog, first, and then, perhaps, in a book. It's not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven't always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It's just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.

And that may be all the point that Twitter needs.

Julian Dibbell's tweet-size thoughts can be found @juliandibbell.