Babbling about Twitter

Danah Boyd points to a study of Twitter usage by PearAnalytics, that concludes:

40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have "pass along value"; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news."

As Danah Boyd suggests in her first sentence, studies like this are irritating. Every time someone complains about Twitter, or microblogging, blogging, the Web or anything else being overrun with "useless" information, I always have the same reaction: you could say the same thing about talking, but no one ever questions whether talking is useful or not.

These are means of communication, used by humans to communicate, each with their own idiosyncrasies, but all driven by the same impulses that have always driven humans to communicate: the urge to connect, to find, to babble, to sell, to buy, to share, to romance, to complain, etc etc etc...

Twitter, or microblogging in general, will bring profound changes to some of its users (it has for me) in how they find/consume/interact with information and other people. As did the printing press, papyrus, the ballpoint pen, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, email, blogs, youtube, mobile phone, among others.

The interesting question is how these things change our informational and social interactions; but the question of whether or not these "new" tools are "good" or "valuable" are moot: if people use them, they use them because they find them good and valuable for whatever reason.

Humans have been pretty consistent in flaws and virtues over the past few thousand years; amazingly we still seem to be surprised when new tools of communication come along and display, in a new way, those same old flaws and virtues.

Follow Hugh McGuire on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bookoven

Comments

[keyisdabomb]

10:33 AM on 09/03/2009

Hey Hugh, I think anytime a web service or, even a human being asks you, "What are you doing?", you will always get responses that may be pointless babble. I think that even know Twitter tries to brand themselves as a information services, the problem is that they are a status update on steroids. I believe there is worth in Twitter, but the problem is it is a bit messy and tough to filter through the content. I am a co-founder of eSwarm.com, a Boulder-based company with an office in NY and we just launched a social network that is entirely focused on facilitating the world's most relevant conversations. You should check it out and let me know what you think.

[MathIsTruth]

11:17 PM on 08/17/2009

It seems to me that understanding the pros and cons of any new means of communication may be valuable, and if nothing else, is just plain interesting to some.

It's not at all clear to me that twitter will have the same impact on humanity that the printing press did, and it's not clear to me that the pros of twitter outweigh the cons.

[Hugh McGuire]

09:30 PM on 08/18/2009

I fully agree with you, and in fact it's very interesting to see this data. It's just the way this kind of stuff is presented -- "most twitter is babble" -- is not an effective way to measure pro versus con; and maybe that's the wrong way to frame the question.

Whether microblogging will have as much impact on information usage in society at large as the printing press did is for history to tell us. I doubt it. But it's certainly had a huge impact on how I consume information - equivalent in scale, I would say, to the internet, email, cell phones.

That's just anecdotal of course, but again, I spend probably as much time finding and transmitting information via microblogging as any other form, besides talking. That's a big change. What it's implications are I'm not sure.