Twitter, hype and internet history

In the past 10 days, two extraordinary things have happened: the first was at investment bank Morgan Stanley, where a 15-year-old intern’s report on “How Teenagers Consume Media” was published with the same fanfare as an analyst’s version might have been.

This report was radical not because it asked an actual teenager what teenagers are like – that’s not the way of big banks – but in fact because it dared to suggest that micro-blogging website Twitter is largely pointless.

Matthew Robson wrote that “most teens have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it”. Which is to say that they realise there’s no merit in saying something unless you have something worth saying.

In practice, that means, however, that Twitter has in a way come of age – the site has proved a massive boon to countless people in extreme situations, be that the Hudson River plane crash survivors or various people caught up in state-sponsored violence around the world.

Twitter’s punchy 140 characters can be used to say important things, or to ask important questions.

What it can’t do is make the mundane exciting. So, in the weird world of the internet, Ashton Kutcher has more than a million followers because his every breath is somehow newsworthy to those that follow him.

Politicians, for instance, should be using Twitter so people know what they’re doing to earn their wages; teenagers have better things to do than such self-promotion, no matter how many rules the web has rewritten.

The second extraordinary thing that happened took place at the BBC and looked at the nature of those new rules.

This was the launch of the corporation’s new series that, with the aid of its viewers, will chart the impact of the web’s first 20 years, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the idea of the internet as we know it, was there to make the case for the web’s work not being done yet. The fact that the net will continue to have a profound impact on all our lives was taken as read.

Then came Bill Thompson, BBC journalist and technology pundit: he seemed to suggest that because the web made people aware of each other’s very different ways of living, it could make the entire planet a better place as repressed people started to realise what they were missing.

Scientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, meanwhile, suggested that the web might be changing the make-up of our brains – both said the net was changing the world, but only one was certain it was, as yet, for the better. — The Daily Telegraph