This week we are looking at the theme of natives versus immigrants on the web, the technology being explored is twitter. I will leave the discussion about natives to my next blog but wanted to say a few words about twitter service/product which I have never felt comfortable with until now.

I will start with an admission – until this week I have never really used twitter. I explored it several times, run a few searches, looked at the discussions, but never contributed (or for that matter even set up a profile). My perception of it is is stronger than that of the BBC: “Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'” (I believe that they were using a very lenient definition of 'babble'). In fact, a random screenshot taken from the twitter homepage shows the topics discussed:

So, while war rages in Afghanistan and Iraq, cars in the US are losing their breaks (Toyota) and MPs in the UK are asked to pay back their expenses the main topics being discussed on twitter are – entertainment and boy bands (4/7 topics) and technology (2/7 topics), I tried reading the last thread “OhJustLikeMe” but still have no idea what it was about.

On the very first page of “the University of Google” by Tara Barbazon, I found the following quote: “Students, in these ruthless times, desperately wants to feel something – anything – beyond the repetitive and pointless patterns of the casualised workplace and the selection of mobile phone ring tones.” I have to admit that after following a few of the threads appearing as the most trendy in twitter (and I am really not a fan of boy bands) I found little evidence of this on Twitter. If anything this reminded me much more of the nihilism that Dreyfus mentions in “on the Internet”; Twitter encourages you to get lost in the crowd, commit to nothing but have an opinion about everything as long as, it is in less than 140 characters. Whereas some of my fellow students found Dreyfus' book to be disparaging and depressing I was actually encouraged when I ran into this headline: “60% Of Twitter Users Quit After A Month”. Some of the metrics behind that report may be flawed but the comments to the article (and others presenting the same data) all circle around “what is twitter for?”

I have to admit that I found twitter to be almost disabling - it seems to encourage the culture of “looking for”, no new idea was actually developed during our chat, things written by other people were simply recycled. So, is twitter the human-based search engine that Dreyfus believes is needed? Not in my mind, simply because - if you do not know to follow then you cannot find the “good stuff”.

On a final note, while I do find twitter to be of very limited use in the classroom (and more so in the corporate training environment) I did find the conversation that we had as a group to be very engaging. Saying that, this had more to do with the content of the conversation rather than the medium it was done through. This, along with the Skype conversation we had the week before is pushing me in the direction of synchronous communication – what if we could replace the corporate training 'flip books' with an hour-long chat were people from different locations guided by more experienced employees gets to develop and understand, truly understand, ideas and information. This will never be a tool to cover compliance requirements but in the information economy could be a very powerful, differentiating, tool.