Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body … so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain …
-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
If you follow my blog you’ll notice that I have moved from twitter skeptic to enthusiast. And recently I have been struggling to explain why I think twitter is a bigger evolution in human communication than facebook, myspace, or anything else in social media.
“Why should I care that someone is getting up or going to the bathroom?”, they ask, just I originally did. And, quite frankly, you shouldn’t, just as I don’t. But I think something bigger is happening on Twitter:
Twitter is a human/machine information revolution because Tweets are memes.
By memes, I mean fundamental units of discrete information that can be rapidly evolved, shared and aggregated.
I find myself forced into information compression with Twitter. Heck, I can even sum-up most of my blog posts with a Tweet and the overall point wouldn’t be lost on the audience just as a Haiku can convey the same point in a fraction of the words of a short story. For instance, this blog entry in 140 characters:
Twitter= info revolution b/c tweets=MEMES: shared, evolved, aggregated like genes. Bigger/different than MySpace, Facebook..
Actually this is only 124 characters, leaving me 16 characters to spare for a URL link created by is.gd.
When I ask people whether they are on Twitter I typically hear something like the following:
- “I’m not on Twitter but I’ve heard of it and don’t really get it. What is it?”
- “How is Twitter different from blogging/delicio.us?”
Twitter is a microblog, a quick thought, a digestible blurb that is easy to type and easy to absorb by people who are constantly context-switching. Of course it isn’t a substitute for a blog post, a novel, a movie or a poem - and I still enjoy all of these.
Tweets represent the fundamental units of human thoughts, and as our tools get better and better for aggregating them and using them practically I predict that everyone will be touched by Twitter one way or another.
Don’t believe me? Check out what practical things you can already do with these memes.
But this blog post is theoretical and it doesn’t explain why I invest my time and energy into building relationships on Twitter. I do think Twitter has a very practical purpose and I’ll explain it on my next blog post.
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