I was listening to Adam Joe today and they came out with something lovely. Theywere commenting on how annoying it is to hear the same praise from so many people about a particular subject. TE prima subject in question was Twitter.
The wierd thing about Twitter is that everybody (near enough) that uses it thinks it's great, whereas everybody that doesn't use it thinks it's a godawful idea and have no idea why anyone would even think about being interested in it.
Before Twitter there was Facebook. Before Facebook there was LJ, Email, the internet... etc. People know it's good. People love it. All their friends use it. And yet its goodness is something they can't quite define. It makes things better. It makes life better. However, for all its users like to talk about it, however much they like to extoll its virtues, the majority are largely unclear as to what its virtues are.
Take, for another example, something a little more tangible. A T.V. series. 24. The Wire. Battlestar Galactica. The Sopranos. The West Wing. Everyone that watches them says they are wonderful. They can't get enough of them and can't wait to tell people about how good they are.
But no one listens. How many times have you told people about this fantastic new thing you've discovedred only to have them act like it's nothing special? You
know it's special. It might even be extraordinary. But how do you convince them?
How do I convince all those people who use email, facebook, lj, sms etc, that all of them (ALL OF THEM) can be replaced by Twitter? That once all-powerful, greatest, best little internet gadget - the social internet revolution - the thing that, more than anything, brought the true nature of the internet to the masses - how do you convince them that it was just a stepping stone?
Look at Facebook now. It's just Twitter with an events manager. But Twitter can manage your events... through Google Calendar. And it connects to your photos. And everything else.
Do you remember when you thought Facebook was new and edgy? Do you remember when you refused to sign up? Why was that? My reasons were: It's just the latest fad. It's just gCal & LJ rolled in to one. It's just MySpace but less ugly. It's just... no. That's not it. My reason, my only real reason, was that I didn't understand it.
And this is what it all boils down to. You don't understand it and you are not willing to spend the time to understand it until it has such a large impact on your life that to not understand it is to be ignorant next to the rest of the population.
Why did you get a computer? Why did you join LJ? Facebook? Twitter? Because you are keeping up with the Joneses.
It's odd then, that I don't see this as a bad thing. If you had signed up before it became popular you'd probably be a geek. You'd care about being a part of something for the sake of being a part of something, or you'd care about it because it's cool new tech, or you'd care about it because no one else has it yet giving you some sort of advantage...
So, what does that mean? Should we be proud to be a part of the herd?
I don't know. I feel that people who aren't a part of the herd are artists. They are the ones that break new ground. I'm not one of them. Never have been. It's not because I can't be bothered, because I am lazy or because I am apathetic, it is because my mind doesn't work like that. I don't want to be the only one on the dancefloor trying out my new moves. I don't want to look like a dick. I don't want to waste my time learning about nonsense that no one else is ever going to use.
But wait... artists are cool, right?
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