Nick Carr, On Twitter
I read this old article on Twitter by Nicholas Carr only recently (he wrote it when Twitter was just starting to catch on) but it was still fun to read. I loved his description what Twitter does: “Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.” The difference from the telegraph is illuminating: “The telegraph required you to stop and ask yourself: Is this worth it? Twitter says: Everything’s worth it!” Nothing seems to have changed between now and then it comes to what people tweet: “And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives.” Or to put it more colourfully: “Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin.” Reduced to tweet size, that would be: “Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking?” And once Twitter got critical mass, it b...